IMPERFECT AND BEAUTIFUL
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 112 Hello, my friends.
As we get further into the summer, I'm starting to think about the year ahead. It's interesting that somehow as a mom we're trained to think of September as being the start of another new year, almost like another January 1st. It's a fresh start, when we get back to our regular schedule after the somewhat lazier days of summer.
Although, I think it's also true that summertime can feel like this crazy time when you're trying to fit in all the fun while also keeping up with all of your other responsibilities. So maybe lazy days isn't exactly how we get to experience summers anymore. On the one hand, you have these fun times to look forward to with family and friends.
Maybe vacations or just adventures that you take. You can want to squeeze the life out of it and enjoy every minute. Be present.
Find joy. But there can also be pressure in that too, because we want all of these experiences to be amazing, and we most likely take responsibility for other people's good time and away, particularly our kids or family. So we're taking the lead on the planning and the logistics of making everyone else's summer amazing.
So here we are putting this pressure on ourselves to both have fun and to make other people have fun. And then we have all of our regular expectations of ourselves and obligations of our lives. Because there's so much happening in the summer, what I hear a lot from my clients is that the time's going so fast and they're not even really sure what they've been doing.
Maybe there's even this feeling in the back of our minds that when September comes, we need to get ourselves back on track, return our focus to some big goals. If your kids are going to college or going back to college, there can also be this pressure to get them launched. And then you think about how things will be when they're not at home.
Or maybe you have a kid in high school and you're looking ahead to the school year, maybe the college process. Come September, it can feel like a lot's on the line, time to step up and support my kid and their dreams, or shift gears to focus more on myself and my dreams. It can feel daunting, a big uphill battle, and you're not sure how it's all going to turn out.
Except for you're pretty sure it's going to be exhausting, and maybe even hard. It's no wonder we want to hold on to these summer days when we feel like we don't have to convince ourselves really hard not to feel guilty about vacations or downtime. It's a shame we don't give ourselves permission to do this more regularly during the year, actually.
If I'm honest, I've been experiencing a bit of overwhelm myself this summer, juggling everything going on with my family, fitting more into the time when I'm working or working on my goals, and also trying to fit in more fun, family dinners, time with friends. So much to fit in, but also still so much to do. I'm very familiar with this feeling.
For so long, I'm so busy had been my mantra. I have so much to do. And actually, if you think about it, when we run around telling ourselves that everything is important, then in truth, what we're saying to ourselves is that nothing's important because we're not taking the time to prioritize or focus on the things that actually matter.
But even more, what we feel is that whatever we do is never enough. Recently, I've been thinking about this concept in the context of big goals. Now, if you don't think you have big goals, stick with me.
Because if you think about any goal you might have, consider that the only reason you have that goal is because of how you think it will make you feel. Think about it. If you want to lose weight, it's because you think it will make you feel healthier, look better in your clothes, and so then maybe feel more confident, more beautiful.
If you want to improve your relationship with your teen or someone in your life, it's because you want to feel more connected, feel more love. If you want to start a business, maybe it's because you want to make money. Maybe it's because you want to share a skill or product with the world, something that matters to you that you think will benefit other people.
Those things are great, but at the end of the day, you do these things because you want to feel accomplished. Maybe proud to be able to afford nice things or support your life. Maybe grateful that you can make an impact.
Any goal comes back to us and how we think we'll feel. Why else would we bother? If losing weight isn't going to make me feel better, why would I go to the effort? If starting a business is going to be a lot of work, and the money itself and the product I'm selling doesn't matter to me, doesn't make me feel any type of positive emotion, why would I bother? It's truly that vision we have for how we will feel once we've accomplished that thing that matters. And think about how motivating that can be to envision that new feeling.
Maybe you don't have a specific goal in mind, but what you'd like to do is feel more of something. More love, more purpose, more meaning, confidence. You could also want to feel less of something, like less anxious or sad, less frustrated.
The promise of this potential positive feeling, the improvement of how you feel, can be really motivating. Now in some cases, our goals can be measured by tangible results or data, like weight loss can be measured on a scale. If you have a business, you can count clients or revenue.
If you're learning a new hobby like pickleball, you might be able to measure your progress in terms of games won. But the number on the scale and the revenue in your business or the number of games you win really is still pretty meaningless until you decide what those numbers mean and then have a feeling about them, good or bad. Other goals might have less tangible measurable results.
Like if your goal is to feel more connection or more love, you might not be able to measure it, but you kind of think that you'll know you've achieved that goal once you feel the way you want to feel, right? So think about your goal now. What is it that you want to achieve? How do you think you'll feel? What will it feel like in your body once you've realized that dream? Have you ever thought about it that way? Sometimes that feeling that we'd love to experience feels so far away, maybe even impossible. It's like we don't even want to get our hopes up because it feels like it's something we might never actually experience.
I think it's so interesting that when it comes to goals, honestly, sometimes the facts don't matter in terms of actually creating the feeling we want to feel. How many times have you lost weight thinking it would make you feel better, and you just feel like, maybe I still need to lose more, like it's not good enough. You don't look quite the way you thought you'd look.
Or you think, maybe if my team would come out of a room more often to eat dinner with me, then I'd feel more connected to her. But then she does, and you don't feel the way you would have hoped. People who start businesses think they'll feel more confident about the process once they've made their first sale or gained their first client, but then realize that they still feel unsure.
So when you really think about it, we often measure how close or far away we are to a goal just by the way we feel about that goal. And sometimes we do feel these moments of excitement and accomplishment having achieved a milestone. But when our goals are related to feelings, they can feel fleeting, like I want to feel more peace.
And I did when I was out on a walk, but now I'm back in my life and I'm stressed out again. Or I felt connected to my team when he opened up to me last night, but now I feel shut out again because he won't talk to me. And then when it comes to tangible goals, we might hit that milestone, but then we move the goalpost further out.
Really, it can feel like you're in a perpetual state of having to do more in order to have that feeling you really want to feel. Like you're on a hamster wheel where you're always running but never really getting anywhere. I think managing our family's lives is a perfect example.
As moms, so many of us take so much responsibility for everything in our kids' lives and our family's life. Of course, we would do anything to help our kids be safe, happy, and successful. I say that all the time.
And so we're constantly looking out for evidence that they're on the right track and that we've done enough. Hopefully we do find evidence of some things going really well, but our brains will literally focus on the things that aren't going as well. You know that saying, you're only as happy as your unhappiest child.
And let's face it, the list of things we want to help our kids with, or at least remind them to take care of, that list is never ending and always growing. If we wait for each of our kids to be safe, happy, and successful in exactly the way we want them to be, and for the entire list of things we have to do to support them checked off, if we wait to find this nirvana in order to give ourselves permission to feel peace, then, my friend, we're going to be waiting a really long time. And it's probably also why that feeling of peace can feel so fleeting and difficult to capture as a mom of teens or college kids.
How many times have you joked, it's always something? We're not actually kidding. This rollercoaster doesn't actually feel optional. We hold out on giving ourselves permission to feel what we really want to feel in so many ways.
I'll go back to the example of starting a business. I mentioned that in the beginning, you think that all you want is to have your first sale or your first client because then I'll feel good about this. I'll feel like this is real.
Maybe that feeling is proud or just like I'm not pretending at this, that this isn't a jobby, like a job hobby. But then you make that first sale and you're surprised to find that you still don't believe in yourself as much as you thought you would. Maybe you worry that the first sale was a fluke or that the business will never grow to be anything significant.
It's like now you've revised the goal so that you can't feel confident in yourself until you meet that next milestone. Maybe if you're approaching the empty nest, you want to feel new purpose. So you set out to try some new things.
You try to meet some new people, pick up a new hobby, but nothing feels like it sticks and you can become disheartened. You feel like you'll know that feeling of purpose once you find it, but you haven't found it yet. You haven't felt it yet.
So then it seems like that feeling is outside of your control to create. In another example, if your goal is to lose weight and one morning you wake up and you're down two pounds, you feel hopeful that maybe what you're doing is working. And then the very next day, somehow you're up four pounds and now you feel demoralized that it's not working.
I could go on and on with these examples of how we're constantly looking for proof, for evidence that what we're trying is working, that we're moving towards our goals and making progress in our lives. And that's not a bad thing. In fact, one could argue that if you're not tracking your progress, not measuring your success towards a goal in any way, then how are you ever going to learn from what's not working? So there's data out there in the world that reflects where you are right now.
This is your reality. And I think it's really important to reflect on that reality in an objective way, not based on how you feel about that reality, but sticking to the facts. The number on the scale, the number of times your teen smiles at you, the amount of money in your bank account, number of things checked off of the to-do list, whatever your goal is, however you would objectively measure your progress towards that goal.
At the end of the day, all of that is just information, just the facts of your life. And of course, you have opinions about it. We're measuring the reality of where we are against where we want to be, how we hope we'd feel when we got there.
What most of us do is that we use this difference, the distance between where we are now and where we want to be. We use this as the reason we can't feel what we want to feel. We use this data against us as justification for why we can't feel more peace or more connection or more confidence.
What we tell ourselves is that we need to change the data. We need to change the reality of where we are so that we can achieve that feeling that we want to achieve. Last week, I'd been feeling kind of burnt out, juggling all of the aspects of my life.
By the weekend, I'd really gotten to the point where I needed to give myself some grace and space to just take a mental break. I took time off from my business and my household to-do list, and I just let myself enjoy time with friends and family. But of course, what often happens when you open up space for what you want to do is that you find other things to do.
So before you know it, I was knee-deep in the dirt of my garden. For most of the summer, I've been recovering from foot surgery, and so I haven't had the physical ability to plant annuals or weed anything. We'd also moved some plants last fall, so we had a few empty beds.
So for weeks, I'd been watching the weeds grow and looking at these boring empty beds. But I'd also been so busy and recovering, I hadn't been able to carve out any time for the garden. But last weekend, I decided to tackle it.
So over the course of the two days, I completely tore apart the bed in the front of our house. I pulled out a bunch of plants, and I replanted them in the empty beds. I bought a few new, more colorful plants and annuals, and basically reconstructed about four or five beds around my house.
By Sunday afternoon, I was incredibly sore and physically exhausted. But I felt such a sense of accomplishment and peace and joy looking at what I had done in just a few days. Now, there were still quite a few beds I never got to.
There are still weeds all around our house. We haven't mulched, so although the plants and flowers look lovely, the dirt beneath it looks like kind of a hot mess. The work isn't finished.
And given my work and my travel schedule, I'm not even sure when I'm going to find time again to garden. But I was able to decide that what I had done was worthy of feeling accomplished and proud and at peace. Even though in my mind, I also knew that there was future work to be done.
In fact, even if I didn't think there was anything more to do, within a week, there will be new weeds that crop up. That's just the nature of gardening, that it's ever-evolving. It's not a one-and-done activity.
If you really want to maintain a beautiful garden, you have to be willing to either hire someone or put in the work yourself. So I found it interesting because here I was feeling so overwhelmed with my other to-do list, and this feeling that no matter what I was doing, it wasn't enough. Yet I spent the whole weekend working incredibly hard on something that wasn't done, and I felt so much accomplishment and peace.
On the one hand, you can look at gardening as this unique experience that doesn't have any application to your real life. But if you really look at the lesson that this experience offers, what's actually happening in my mind as I'm gardening is fascinating. So the first interesting thing about gardening is that in a relatively short period of time, you can create something really beautiful.
You pick out a blooming plant and you put it in your garden and there you have it, beauty. But even when you plant seeds, although they aren't beautiful right away, you know that the miracle is likely to happen if you take care of the plant as it grows in the right way. So there's this possibility of beauty with specific effort.
Now when you think about it, when it comes to your garden, there's quite a bit out of your control. You can't control the weather or the climate where you live or the seasons. You can't control the bugs or the wildlife.
I mean, you can certainly try. You can water your garden and you can spray for bugs and put up fences. You can fertilize the soil.
So there are some things you can do. But also, you know that even when you put in your best effort, it might not work out the way you want. And I don't blame anyone for that when that happens.
So interesting that in my mind, I'm very clear about choosing to take responsibility for what I can control, namely the effort I put into the garden. And after that, it's in nature's hands. And although I guess I could get mad at Mother Nature that my rhododendrons didn't work out in my backyard, I choose not to waste my energy.
I could also choose to blame myself for not knowing enough about caring for plants that I would plant rhododendron where I did. I also choose not to blame myself. But what's even more fascinating is that I didn't have to proactively make all of those decisions.
It just felt intuitive. The weather and the climate aren't at all in my control. But my effort is in my control.
And I intuitively understand the difference between the two. The third thing that feels special to me about gardening is that it feels easy for me to set boundaries around it. I don't expect myself to garden every day.
In fact, I know that the only time I can really spend any time in the garden is over the weekend. In my mind, for it to be worth it to get covered in dirt, which is what always happens to me when I garden, I want to spend at least two or three hours doing it to be able to invest in the project. If I can't find that time, I let it be okay.
I could absolutely still create not-enoughness around gardening. It's an option for me to beat myself up about the state of my garden. But I don't.
I choose not to. I guess you could say that I'm also clear with myself about where gardening stands on my list of priorities. Although it makes me happy to have a beautiful garden, at this time in my life, it's unnice to have.
I'm able to allow myself to not include it on my long to-do list of have-to-dos. So it feels like a treat, actually to be able to do something without all this pressure for a result, or frankly to just put another check on the list. The fact that I was able to invest any time in gardening actually made me feel great.
I decided over the weekend it was a worthwhile investment of my time and my energy. But also, I'm not needing to spend a ton of time every day doing it, or beating myself up about what's left. I'm able to clearly articulate in my mind what's enough.
The last thing about gardening for me that's interesting is that the result doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, it never will be. And no matter what I do, it will require more effort to maintain.
And so I let all of that be okay. I let it be imperfect. There's something really powerful about loving a result, even when it's not perfect.
Did I love the journey? Did I just love being outdoors on a beautiful day, feeling productive, or creating something beautiful? Maybe having a break from my regularly scheduled life? I think it was all of it. So it's maybe even less about the actual result of having plants in the ground, and more about the journey to get there, my experience along the way. As I came off of this weekend, I realized how much of a lesson this experience had to teach me about all of the other areas of my life.
So let's go through these four lessons. One, in a short time, you can create something beautiful. Or believe that your small effort today will lead to something beautiful in the future.
You can apply this to absolutely any goal, believing that your effort is worthwhile and leading to something beautiful. The second lesson is that in life, there are things that are in your control and things that aren't. How much time do you spend blaming the world or blaming yourself because your life isn't the way you want it to be? Do you realize that this is also a choice you're making? Look, is it the sun's fault that my hosta brown out? Yes.
Is it also my fault that I planted them in the full sun? Also yes. Is it worth my energy to blame the sun and myself because the hosta brown out? Absolutely not. I've learned a lesson, actually.
Now I get to set boundaries. I plant my hosta in the shade, for example. When life throws you a curveball, do you focus on what's in your control and the lessons you have to learn? Or do you spend your energy blaming and feeling resentful? I have to be honest, this was something I've struggled with for so much of my life and was the first thing I was able to overcome when I learned about self-coaching.
And it's allowed me to release so much pain and anger in my life. I'm now very clear about choosing to take responsibility for what I can control and letting go of the rest. The third lesson from gardening is that it feels easy for me to set boundaries around it.
Why can't I do this with every other area of my life? I have to say that this is an area where I continue to grow. I think that having goals is a beautiful thing, no matter what they are, even if your goal is just to feel happier in your life. But the downside can be that if you haven't achieved your goal yet, you can feel like you haven't done enough, that there's still so much to do to get there.
And you can also get sidetracked by all of the things that aren't in your control. With gardening, I'm able to set clear boundaries and trust myself to stick to them. Consider how powerful it could be to set boundaries in your life around your goals, that you could make a clear decision about how much effort you put in and decide that that effort is enough.
If you're building a business, you can decide that investing two hours a week is enough for right now. If you're trying to reconnect with your team, you can decide that it's enough that you're always there for them when they're open to connect, that you don't have to force more connection. If you're looking for new purpose, you can decide that right now your purpose is to explore your new purpose.
Could that be enough? Think about the power of just deciding what you're willing to do right now and let it be enough. The final lesson is that the result doesn't have to be perfect. It will actually never be perfect.
And there is actually no end result. There's no end to the goals we'll set for ourselves, no end to the connection we want to build in our lives, or the effort we have to put in to keep ourselves physically or mentally healthy. It's less about the end goal and almost all about the journey along the way.
Can you let it be imperfect and beautiful? My friends, these are the lessons I teach in my coaching program, Mom 2.0. And I invite you to reach out and learn more. You can find a place where your life is imperfect and beautiful and decide all of it is enough. This week, as I let these lessons sink in, I found that reminder that I needed, that I am actually the only one who can create my own peace and joy and fulfillment.
Nothing and no one else can do it for me. There is so much power in that, knowing that I am the gardener of my own well-being and happiness. And this is exactly what I teach in Mom 2.0. The effort I put in creates something beautiful.
It's a decision I get to make. And you can too. Until next time, my 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.
