YOU CAN'T AFFORD TO NOT INVEST IN YOURSELF
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 50.
Hello, friends. You know, I was just thinking the other day that if 20 years ago someone told me I was eventually going to become a life coach, I would have laughed. First of all, I had no idea what a life coach was 20 years ago, no less that I would eventually discover one that would change my life.
To be honest, I'm kind of the person who always thought of herself as being able to figure things out. Not necessarily the smartest, but willing to work hard. Not necessarily the emotionally strongest, but with enough of a can-do attitude that I could pull myself through tough times.
This approach to life served me well for a really long time, but I reached a point where it just wasn't working anymore. Maybe it was the impact of having pushed myself for so long, probably at my own expense. Then on top of that, starting to wonder what it was all for.
My kids didn't need me as much anymore. I wasn't feeling particularly inspired by my job. I wasn't making time for the things that I loved, and I was stressed out all of the time.
I think I've shared before that I actually found life coaching originally because I was trying to kick the habit of drinking every night to relax. I didn't think I was an alcoholic, but honestly found that I had a really hard time not drinking at night. I would get home at the end of a long day, at a job I didn't love, only to find the house a mess and dinner needing to be made.
The glass of wine had been my reward for so long, the thought of not giving myself that reward seemed like a cruel punishment. And if it was only one glass of wine, maybe that would have been fine. But it was often a few glasses, and then chips, and cheese, and some chocolate.
The wine seemed to be my gateway drug to a bunch of other questionable choices at the end of every day. The next morning I'd feel sick to my stomach, slightly hungover, and over time I was watching my weight creep up. Maybe even worse than all of that was the guilt and the shame, if I'm honest.
Intellectually I knew that I should be able to stop, but I didn't really want to. Or I wanted to, but I didn't want to. I came across the podcast of a life coach who explained in such simple terms why we overdrink, or overeat, or overdo anything that makes us feel pleasure in the moment and suddenly it all made sense.
For me, my problem wasn't being an alcoholic, at least not yet. My problem was that I didn't want to feel. I'd found a way to numb the resentment and the boredom and frustration and anxiety of my life with a glass of wine.
And since I'd practiced that habit, my brain was on autopilot, solving my emotional problems with a quick fix that ended up being a long-term problem. I came to realize that my overdrinking problem was a symptom of a much bigger problem I had in my life, which was I wasn't being honest with myself about what I wanted, what I needed. And that was just the tip of the iceberg.
I, like most of us, was fully subscribed to the idea that other people can make us mad or hurt our feelings. So when my boss questioned my work, I was furious. When a friend didn't include me in a night out, I felt hurt.
When my husband didn't help clean up after dinner, I felt resentful. We can feel like we're ping-ponging through a whole series of emotions throughout every day, and it's exhausting, honestly, to talk ourselves off the ledge all the time, to hold on to the anger, resentment, and anxiety, or even worse, to hold on to the guilt, things I wasn't doing right as a mother. In hindsight, I realized how lucky I was to have found life coaching when I did, because, man, have the teen years brought me to my knees.
If I didn't have the ability to manage my mind, process emotions, take responsibility for creating my own peace, if I didn't have these skills, the past few years might have gone very differently. And look, the reality of life is that we will face challenges, circumstances out of our control that can only honestly be referred to as challenging. Health challenges, relationships, financial struggles, our teens, the risks they take, the people they become as they pull away.
We view these circumstances through a set of glasses that we don't realize are tinted by our own values, beliefs, and experiences. We have this perspective, but we don't realize that this is just our interpretation of what's happening. We think it's the truth, like it's true my husband is a narcissist, or it's true that my boss is unappreciative, or my kids are disrespectful.
And maybe our interpretation of the facts is pretty close to the mark. Maybe your husband is a narcissist, but now what? The tools I've discovered through life coaching have given me the power to observe my own lens honestly, and then decide intentionally how I want to move forward. But I'd be lying if I told you this is always easy.
One of my biggest emotional and mental challenges over the past year has been in relation to my boys. The other day I wrote an entry in the very last page of a journal that I've been keeping since October of last year. It has this beautiful leather cover with a tree covered in leaves of hearts.
I take the journal with me everywhere and have a practice of journaling with my coffee first thing every morning. It's such a gift this time. I journal to reflect on the day before, both the accomplishments and the things for which I'm grateful, but also to reflect on the challenges and things I have to work on.
I started this journal October 25th of last year, so this book represents a detailed reflection of the past seven months of my life. I turned to the first page of this journal and I want to share a bit of where my head was seven months ago. I decided to turn a new page.
I've been experiencing such a crazy amount of anxiety and it's taking a toll. I've been fighting reality, living in the worst case scenario, but I've also been learning and growing. It's interesting to think that I was always going to have to go through this to let go of my boys.
As I sit here, there are so many different versions of the future that I keep thinking about and I don't want any of them. Chief among them is the thought of losing my son, but right now he is here. He's with me, so my job is to be here to love him unconditionally and to be here if he needs me.
My work is to be my best version of myself for my son. I have a hard time doing that when I make his life my business. I have so many opinions about how my sons should live their lives and these opinions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.
It's their life. In the meantime, I could stand to get into my own business again. There's plenty of work to do there.
I've been gaining weight. I've been slacking in my workouts. I've been eating like crap, drinking again, not keeping up with friends, bailing on commitments.
Today, I'll focus on myself. I've got this. Well, this was the hopeful opening entry of the journal.
The very next day, October 26th, this is how I started. I can actually feel the cortisol releasing when I feel stressed and anxious. I had had a rough night.
Our family was going through some pretty significant challenges at the time and in my conversations with so many of my clients at this stage of life, so many of us are wading through anxiety over our kids and their choices. Frustration over the challenges of communicating with our want-to-be adult teens. Confusion over how to set and enforce boundaries.
Not sure where to draw the line. Guilt over having done it wrong and fear that someday we might regret if we don't do the exact right thing right now. It's a lot.
I couldn't imagine having gone through the past few months without the ability to manage my mind and my emotional life. Without understanding where I have control and where I don't. Without the peace of being able to accept the reality of my life with grace and still be able to take responsibility for and control of what comes next.
Looking back at that version of me who wrote that journal entry seven months ago, I have so much love for her. She was literally doing her best but felt at times like she was drowning in grief. I love the quote, the pain will leave you when it's done teaching you.
And in that season of my life last year, I had quite a few lessons to learn. In some ways they were parenting lessons, but even more they were lessons about myself. What I needed and expected and how those needs and expectations were wreaking havoc on my relationship with my older son.
As a life coach and someone who has had some pretty incredible life coaches of her own, I had tools to support me to get me through some pretty serious anxiety and grief. But I was also at the point where I felt like I needed to explore my options. And so in addition to seeking out regular coaching, I also set up meetings with therapists to see if they might give me insights into how to deal with my emotional life in a different way.
I want to share some of this journey with you for two reasons. One, I believe that all of us can benefit from having someone who's in our corner. Someone whom we can trust to share our innermost thoughts and feelings.
Our husbands or our partners might not be able to fully relate to what we're going through. Our friends maybe might relate too much or we just don't feel comfortable sharing some of the scariest stuff with them. In many ways, what I think all of us deserve is someone who listens without judgment, who isn't going to make it about them or tell us we're wrong for feeling the way we do.
So in this respect, both counseling therapy and life coaching offers a support system, the listening ear. But based both on my personal experience and also my experience as a life coach and someone who has studied the important line between therapy and life coaching, I wanted to share my perspective on some of the ways both of these resources can help us as moms as we navigate the teen years and the significant transition to life after our kids leave home. So therapy, which is also sometimes called counseling or psychotherapy, focuses on addressing emotional, psychological, and mental health issues.
Therapists are trained professionals with specialized knowledge in diagnosing and treating mental health disorders. People might go to them to treat conditions like anxiety, depression, trauma, and addiction. Therapists often explore with their clients past experiences to help them understand how those experiences might have contributed to who they are today or how these experiences might be influencing their current behavior.
Therapists also help clients process challenging emotions and seek to give them strategies to do this on their own. Insight into the past can be particularly helpful when a client is processing past trauma. But for a client who is having challenges that aren't necessarily based on past trauma or in a mental health issue, therapy can be less focused on goal-setting or making decisions about how to move forward to deal with current challenges.
Of course, all of this depends on the particular therapist you're working with and whether you hire a life coach or a therapist or both, they're not mutually exclusive. I think one of the most important factors in choosing someone to work with is personal fit. You want to feel like you can trust the person and that their style and approach matches what you need.
So in the effort to make sure that I had all the resources I needed, I interviewed six different therapists and this is what I found. In those conversations, we spent a lot of time talking through my life, my family structure, my past, and thankfully there really weren't any boogeymen hiding in my closet. What I really had was an immediate problem in dealing with my kids, my own painful emotions, and how to figure out how to move forward.
Each therapist ended up giving me different advice and to be honest, it felt kind of like they were telling me what I should do. My mom would say this probably means they weren't great therapists, but my takeaway is that because I didn't really have a mental health issue to work through and my problem really was related to something specific, a current challenge, the therapist might have found themselves a bit out of their element. For me, and each of us is different, but for me, I didn't want someone to tell me what to do.
I needed someone to help me work through what I wanted to do, what I felt was true for me in managing my family and my life. So as I continue to regularly work through my challenges with my life coaches, I found the solutions I was looking for in myself. Unlike therapy where I would say they help you look to the past to understand why you might be feeling the way you are, life coaches tend to focus on the present.
The past is done. It's a circumstance in your life that you can't change and so holding on to whatever has happened in the past only creates regret and pain for us right now. That's not to say that we shouldn't process and work through past trauma, which is exactly why trauma survivors should work with a therapist to do that work.
But assuming that work has been done, a life coach's job is to help you figure out how you want to think about the past, the present, and the future so that you can decide how you want to show up now and going forward. There are some life coaches, they might even call themselves accountability coaches, who help clients create action plans and then hold them accountable. This is typical in weight loss coaching, for example.
The coach might work with you to create a meal plan and then have you report on your progress. Think of the typical Weight Watchers model. But a great life coach will not only work with you to create a meal plan that works for you and your schedule and your preferences, but they'll also work with you on your mindset to help you understand why it's a challenge to not stick with your plan, why we tend to give up on ourselves when the plan doesn't work right away, and even why we tend to self-sabotage after we've seen a bit of progress and then we eat to celebrate.
This is a helpful example because when it comes to approaching goals, we often know what we should be doing. If you want to lose weight, you know you have to eat less. When I wanted to stop drinking every night, I knew I should just not pour that glass of wine.
So we know the actions we should be taking, but we don't understand why it's hard. So we end up on a downward spiral thinking there's something wrong with us when really what we have is a mindset problem. When it came to my drinking, here's what I discovered.
I came home and I had a bunch of thoughts. I wish I didn't have to cook dinner. It's been a hard day already.
Why do I have to cook when my husband's watching TV? I'd feel resentful or angry, but I wouldn't want to feel that way. And so I'd have a glass of wine to try to feel better. And every day that I did that, I reinforced a neural pathway in my mind that was along the lines of, I deserve this.
I need this to relax. And look, our brains are designed to prioritize pleasure. So when they get a little bit of it, they want more of it.
Nothing's gone wrong. The trick is in understanding how to unwind these habitual ways of thinking. It's a mindset problem, not an action problem.
As a life coach, I also work with clients on action planning if that's appropriate to their goals. But more often, my clients come to me wanting to work on their relationship with their whether that be trying to get them to take better care of themselves or to stop engaging in risky behavior, or whether that be dealing with the attitudes and disrespect we sometimes see in kids as they try so hard to grow up and figure out who they are. Clients also come to me wanting to work on their relationships with themselves.
And that often looks like trying to figure out their purpose as their kids leave a nest or as they work through a divorce. Women also come to me because they're exhausted from managing the difficult emotional rollercoaster they're on and know they need to start taking better care of themselves. In my program, I work with clients to help them see the lens they have in their life.
Here's a simple example. A client recently told me she was frustrated that her kids weren't cleaning up their rooms and then she felt guilty because she yelled at them and didn't want to show up that way as a mom. As we talked through the situation, I helped her see that the only reason she was frustrated was because she thought that if the kids didn't clean up that she would have to.
She was so sure of that thought that she didn't realize she also had an option not to have to clean up. For her, having a clean house was a given, so it became her problem if the kids didn't help. So we talked through scenarios.
If it's not true that she has to clean up, what else could be possible? We came up with one idea, which was that she could just not clean up and let them leave their rooms a mess. But that option didn't feel comfortable for her. So we explored a second option.
She could set a boundary with her kids. Either they clean their rooms or there would be consequences. For example, she could charge her kids for cleaning their rooms, but she didn't love that idea either.
Finally, she offered that what she really wanted to do was sit down with her kids and explain to them why it's important to clean their rooms. So I offered, would you also be willing to ask them if a clean room is also important to them and give them a bit of a say in how clean their room has to be? Would you be willing to meet them in the middle? That solution felt right to her. And that's just a simple example.
But my premise in working through solutions with my clients is that you know the answer that's right for you, but we often don't see all of the options in front of us because we're so wedded to the beliefs that we don't even realize we have. Learning the skill of awareness and understanding your own mind is in and of itself a game changer. I also work with my clients to help them understand how their perspective, the lens through which they see the world, is actually what creates their emotional life.
It's not what other people say or do. Understanding your mind, why you take things personally, why what other people do is a problem for you. This understanding gives you back all of your power because we can't change others, but we can decide how we want to show up.
And that includes setting boundaries that take care of us and our needs. Boundaries are about deciding ahead of time how we will show up when other people do specific things. It's actually less about the other person than it is about us and protecting our own emotional well-being.
These simple tools unlock our ability to create more peace in our lives, to decide on purpose how we want to show up in our lives and in our relationships, and help us work towards creating any result we want in our life. You might be thinking that life coaching is a luxury that you can't afford, but I want to invite you to consider that life coaching may be something you can't afford not to consider. How many thousands or tens of thousands of dollars do you spend on your child, on their dreams, their future, their hobbies, their wishes, their well-being? There's no doubt in our minds our children are worthy of this investment.
If we think it would make their life better, if it would make them happier, help them be more successful, we are sold. There's nothing we wouldn't do or sacrifice to support our children. But when it comes to us, our own dreams, our happiness, even our well-being, we feel selfish for wanting to prioritize ourselves.
We don't think our dreams or goals are worthy of investment. We think we need to ask for permission. We're not actually sure it's possible to feel any better.
We feel selfish, powerless, unworthy, and hopeless. These are the feelings that cause us not to invest in ourselves, even when we know we need support. As a life coach, it's my job to help my clients see their mind, and if any of this resonates with you, I want to invite you to question all of the above assumptions.
That you're selfish for wanting to prioritize yourself. That your dreams or goals aren't worthy of investment. That you have to ask for permission.
That it's not possible to feel better. Not possible to build a stronger relationship with your child. Not possible to find a new purpose.
How could taking care of yourself allow you to help your family even more? What price would you place on feeling better, strengthening your relationship with your child, renewing your life purpose? What if I could wave a magic wand and guarantee all of this was possible? If you really believed your dreams were possible, would you hesitate to advocate for yourself? Here's what I know to be true. You don't have to feel like the circumstances of your life dictate your emotional life. You don't have to resign yourself to feel miserable or frustrated.
You don't have to give up on creating a new positive relationship with your child. And you don't have to wait to begin thinking about your dreams until some future date. But you may have to give up on the thought that you're not worthy of investing yourself to make that happen.
So whether you seek out a therapist, another life coach, or you consider my program, I want to be the one to tell you, you are worthy. Your dreams are possible. And I believe in you.
You can't afford not to invest in yourself and your emotional well-being. Your life is waiting for you to live in. If you haven't already, check out my program, Mom 2.0.
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.
