THE ONE OBSTACLE TO A HAPPY LIFE
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 125.
Hello, friends. I'm really excited because in this episode, I'm launching a new series on the Small Jar Podcast, and that is the one obstacle to creating happiness in midlife. Although I tend to focus many of my podcasts on moms in midlife, this obstacle is actually a challenge for men as well.
And if you're a listener, you'll see that on this podcast, I sometimes go back and forth between talking about life-raising teens or the challenges of the empty nest and everything in between. I think what's interesting is that because we have our children over a period of time, we really can experience this long transition to the official empty nest over a period of many years. In fact, you can start to grapple with your child pulling away even in middle school.
I've been having so many conversations with women who have kids in their early teens who are already starting to notice the mood swings and the talking back, and they're already struggling with how to deal with all of it. So that's one end of the spectrum. And then you move into the high school years and the stress of friendships and dating and sex and drugs, and then looking ahead to the college process.
And honestly, even as your kids are still a few years away from high school graduation, you can start to think about how quickly time is flying towards the empty nest. You're already looking ahead to those moments when you're going to have to let go of that child and let them fly on their own. But then the oldest leaves.
So you start to have this empty nest experience and missing the oldest and figuring out how to parent a college kid. But then you're also grappling with the challenges of raising teens still at home. And frankly, every kid is different.
And so whatever lessons you learned raising your first may or may not apply to your other kids. So you find you still have lessons to learn with each of your kids as you face their different personalities, goals, and challenges. I've also worked with women whose kids are about to graduate college or already out of college, and they're grappling with questions around how to set boundaries with their adult kids and how to support them as their kids try to become independent.
How much support should they give them? What boundaries are you supposed to set if they move back home? So my point is that the empty nest is not a singular static point in time. It's why I sometimes refer to it as the empty nest straddle. You've got one foot in the empty nest and the other still planted in a nest full of growing birds, and sometimes later they come back to the nest.
You can experience an ongoing evolution in the way that you want to support your kids and an ever-changing perspective in terms of who you are as a mom and your role, your purpose as a mom. At the same time, you're also experiencing an ongoing evolution in terms of how you think about yourself as a woman separate from your kids. You can experience challenges with parenting, issues with relationships, whether that be with your teens or your parents or in-laws or spouse, your partner, your friendships, and how they evolve.
And you grapple with your purpose in terms of how you spend your time, whether that be invested in your kids or increasingly as a journey to figure out what the next chapter looks like for you. We have so many unique dynamic circumstances that each of us face. I see so many women who are increasingly wanting to start their own businesses or non-profits.
They want to capture the meaning and value they want to give to the world in a different way. And some women grapple with this question around whether their second chapter should involve actually getting a new job if they haven't worked or starting a new career. Sometimes it's because they want or need to earn more money, but other times women consider this path because they think that in order for their second chapter to be as meaningful as their work raising kids, that they have to be earning an income.
For some women, it can feel like raising kids was such a valuable investment of their time that just playing pickleball doesn't seem to have the same impact or value. And for some reason, they're inspired to think about what that career could be that could come next. But others feel this pressure to be paid for their contributions, but then aren't quite sure that they want a job.
I've also worked with women who continue their careers while raising kids, and they still experience the challenges of the empty nest straddle. It's a perfect example of how the grass is not always greener. I'll often talk to women who stayed at home raising their kids who say they wished that they'd kept a career going because then it would give them something obvious to do in their transition to the empty nest.
But quite frankly, because I coach so many women who have been working the entire time and they still grapple with these challenges, whether that be in how to support or parent their kids, or challenges with their partner or other relationships, or challenges with feeling like life is just too much, financial challenges, stress at work, finding balance. So this is the reason why if you look at the Small Jar podcast and the range of topics that I've covered in past episodes, you can see a wide breadth of challenges that we as women face in midlife. And every episode has been inspired either by challenges that I personally face, and many more that my clients have faced.
And there's so much overlap with all of it. It's never just one person. In fact, I've truly felt so much validation in my own struggles because I inevitably talk with woman after woman who reflects back to me some of the pain or challenge that I've gone through as well.
It helps me see that I'm not alone. And I hope with this podcast that I'm able to give that gift back to you as well. Because truly, whatever you're going through as you experience the long transition of the emptiness straddle, you are not alone.
So I've been thinking a lot about what it is that all of us have in common as we grapple with the emptiness straddle. If the circumstances of our lives and the challenges in midlife are all unique, I wanted to find a way to characterize that common denominator of these challenges that all of the women I work with face. In the past, I've done a mom archetype series.
And if you've been listening to me for a while, you might have already taken the mom archetype quiz. And it's still available on my website and linked in my Instagram account, smalljarcoach. But the quiz and the series is really designed to frame the mindset we bring to raising and launching teams so that we can see the strengths we bring to this role, but also the vulnerabilities that are essentially the Achilles heel of our perspective.
The four archetypes are the guardian, the achiever, the nurturer, and the mentor. I've been wanting to take this model a step further because while I've highlighted in the series the strengths and the challenges that come with each of these models, what I haven't explored as deeply is how you leverage the strengths of the archetypes in order to overcome them. So in this series, I want to return to the mom archetypes, but I'm actually going to simplify the conversation so that it's as useful as possible to you and your own self-development work.
And I'm also going to broaden the application of these archetypes to help us understand our perspective, our strengths, and our vulnerabilities, not just as moms, but as women, as we grapple with all of the unique circumstances of our lives. So here's the thing. When it comes down to it, there is truly one common denominator with all of the women who come to me for coaching, one common challenge, one unifying obstacle that's keeping all of us stuck in our lives and actually keeping us from all of the things we want in our lives, keeping us from finding peace and happiness and purpose, connection, meaning, value, confidence, self-worth, and love.
All of us deeply want these things. We want to feel these emotions. In fact, do you realize that the only reason you do anything in your life is to try to capture more of these emotions? We put so much effort into our role as a mom because it allows us to feel love and connection and meaning and purpose and joy and pride.
We nurture relationships because we want to feel connection and love. We want to feel like we matter. We want to feel confident enough to go after the things we want in life.
My friend, you and I have spent our whole lives pursuing the potential for these beautiful emotions, and sometimes we capture them and it's everything. My son came home from college last weekend to join us for a walk to support research for a cure for diabetes because my youngest was diagnosed when he was three. We've been supporting this walk for 14 years, and my youngest somehow, miraculously, has never felt sorry for himself.
This kid, when he was three years old in the hospital, and I couldn't stop crying because I knew nothing about diabetes, and I was devastated by the diagnosis, this beautiful three-year-old boy gave me a hug and he said, Mommy, we're going to be okay. In the early years before we put him on the insulin pump, we shot him with an insulin needle four to eight times a day and pricked his little fingers even more to test his blood sugar. That's a lot of needles for a little guy.
He started calling his shots whatevers because he was so determined to show us how tough he was, how his shots were whatever. So when we formed our first walk team to support JDRF, which was formerly the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, and it's recently been renamed Breakthrough T1D, we named our walk team Team Whatever, and we've been walking and fundraising since my baby was four. He is now 17, and over the past 14 years, he has raised $280,000 for diabetes research.
Talk about pride. Last weekend, my parents came, my oldest came home from college, and we all walked together in what is likely to be our last walk as Team Whatever. It's my son's senior year, and while I imagine he'll continue to do, as we say, whatever it takes to end Type 1, he won't be home for the walk next year.
He'll be in a new community with new opportunities and challenges. So this was our last walk with my absolute favorite people in the whole world, supported by everyone we love, family, old and new friends, my son's school friends, and friends of mine, and my husband's from every stage of our lives. This is what it's all about, my friends.
We don't live our lives because we want them to be perfect. We know we're going to face challenges, but what we live for is those moments when we get to celebrate the wins, the coming together, the gratitude of facing big challenges and seeing how much stronger we've all become, the pride of seeing our kids overcome obstacles and how that defines who they are, who they can become, the opportunity to feel love and gratitude and connection with friends who you rarely get to see because they support you in something that means so much to you year after year, seeing people show up and knowing that it's because they love you. Peace, happiness, purpose, connection, meaning, love.
This is what we're all looking for, my friends. And we all have so much of it already, and yet these beautiful moments can be fleeting or just out of reach, something we should be feeling more. But we feel stuck and weighted down by the challenges of our lives.
This is where we can find ourselves in midlife amidst all of the transition and the uncertainty and the evolution. We can find ourselves stuck and unable to move forward, not able to capture more of the joy and the beauty that we know our lives have to offer. So amidst all of the unique challenges we moms face in midlife, what is that common denominator? The one obstacle we face to create the life that we want.
This one obstacle can be summed up in one word, and that obstacle is an emotion. I want to invite you to think about the power of this simplicity for a moment. That the only thing standing in your way of having a happy, connected, purposeful, peaceful life is an emotion you are experiencing.
Now the truth is it could be many emotions, and that only compounds the challenge that you face. But let's explore what some of those potential emotions could be. Anxiety, sadness, frustration and hurt, resentment, powerlessness, uncertainty, a fear of failure, a lack of confidence, loneliness, guilt, regret, self-judgment or self-doubt.
There could be many more. My friend, these emotions can keep you stuck. For a start, these painful emotions aren't comfortable.
In fact, they can make you feel terrible. Now there are times when painful emotions keep us stuck, and there are other times that painful emotions can be required for us to grow and move forward. And sometimes it can be both.
For example, fear is an emotion that can keep you stuck because it makes you hesitant to try new things or take on new challenges. But fear is also an emotion that you often have to learn how to feel and process in order to grow. The work of challenging yourself and going out of your comfort zone often means that you feel fear.
And the process of overcoming that emotion as you take on those new challenges, that is actually the key component in the way that you grow in that situation. Just by facing your fears and deciding to try that new thing, even when you're afraid, gives you the opportunity to create a whole new level of confidence. The chance to be someone who was able to achieve something even though she was afraid.
Using this example of fear, it's interesting to consider that painful or uncomfortable emotions can be both required for growth and an obstacle to growth. So in this new podcast series, I want to explore the difference. When do we need to allow ourselves to feel and learn to process uncomfortable emotions? And when do we need to learn to let them go? And what's the difference? What I've found with so many of my clients and women who come to me for coaching is that more often than not, when we're experiencing these painful or uncomfortable emotions, we feel terrible in a way that makes us feel stuck in that emotion.
And typically, these women have already tried to find ways to get out of these emotions. They've tried to address the challenges that they're facing so that they can make the situation better or to go away so that they can feel more of the emotion that they want to feel instead. I'll give you a few examples.
When we feel anxious about our teens, what we've been doing for decades is that we try to make sure our kids are safe or that they're on the right track. Because if we can just address the root cause of our anxiety in our minds, if we can make sure that our kids are okay, then we get to feel better. We get to drop the anxiety and find peace.
Or if we feel like we're losing our purpose as our kids move into the next chapter, we can think that we need to create new purpose by finding a job or a new hobby. So in various ways, we look to address these challenging emotions by changing the circumstances of our lives to better line up with the circumstances that we imagine would make us feel better. And it's not like that strategy is wrong.
I'm a big believer in being proactive and advocating for yourself. If you're facing a situation that you can do something about, what's the point of being passive and doing nothing? The problem comes when these strategies don't actually help us create what we're hoping to create. Or quite simply, when those strategies don't work.
Like with our teens. There's so much in their lives that we can't change or fix. If they're having challenges with friendships, for example, as much as we want to support them and talk them through it, we can't change how other kids treat them.
And we can't change our kids' mind about how hurtful relationships can be. In essence, we can't take away our kids' pain. And so then we can feel stuck in anxiety about that.
As moms, we are geared to try to do whatever we can to improve our circumstances, particularly our kids' circumstances. But when we can't, we feel stuck in these painful negative emotions. And what I found in my own personal experience, which has only been validated by countless clients who have come to me with their own experiences and their own failed efforts, is that notwithstanding our valiant efforts to try to support our kids, notwithstanding the reality that we would go to the ends of the earth to support them and help them through their challenges, that we are actually incredibly resourceful and creative in the many ways we try to do what we can.
Notwithstanding all of that, we can still feel powerless to actually change the circumstances of our lives, either our kids' lives or even our own lives. So when we can't fix the emotion by changing our circumstances, then we're left with this emotion that seems to have no solution. So the painful emotion becomes the obstacle to us moving forward, to us creating the life experience that we want.
Now, there are a number of reasons why emotions that are painful can keep us stuck. First, we can resist an emotion by trying to avoid making a decision about it. Sometimes it feels safer to stay in indecision than have to risk the fear of making the wrong decision.
So then we find ourselves stuck in inaction or uncertainty, definitely not moving forward. We can also try to suppress our painful emotions by ignoring them or trying to stay distracted. This is where our eating habits or drinking habits sometimes help us buffer away painful emotions.
This obviously doesn't help you move through the emotion and actually can cause the pain to build up and become even worse or cause us to feel shame because of the behaviors we're using to distract ourselves. Sometimes our pain can become all-consuming. Emotions like grief, anger, or shame can be so overwhelming that they dominate our thoughts and our actions.
It can become all we think about. Painful emotions can also perpetuate or even create self-limiting beliefs. Lack of confidence might make you think that this is who you are, that you suffer from an identity of being not enough.
Our emotions can actually also start to limit our perception of what's possible for our lives. You can start to ruminate in these thoughts, get stuck in a cycle of negative thinking. Worst case scenarios are one common example.
Some emotions also cause us to fall into kind of a victim mentality, where you see yourself as the victim of circumstances out of your control. This can be because of your kids' behavior, which you feel powerless to change, or because of how other people show up in your relationships, making you feel resentful or unappreciated. Emotions can also cause us to see the world through our pain.
It can become our whole world. If you feel hurt or disconnected with your teen, you may view their behavior through that lens, assuming the worst or misinterpreting their actions, taking things personally when they're not about you. Sometimes when you're in pain, you can isolate yourself.
If you're experiencing deep sadness, then you can think it's easier to stay home and feel sad than to have to make an effort to make new connections. Ultimately, painful emotions can feel terrible and leave you exhausted physically, emotionally, and mentally. And clearly, this has an impact on your energy and motivation to move forward.
So in all of these ways, painful emotions can keep you stuck if you don't learn how to process and understand the true underlying cause of these emotions. So think about what this one emotion is for you, that one painful emotion that may be keeping you from truly moving forward. Is it anxiety, sadness, frustration, hurt or resentment, powerlessness, uncertainty or a fear of failure, lack of confidence, loneliness, guilt or regret? In this one obstacle series, I'm going to be exploring each of these painful midlife emotions individually to take a deep look at a few things.
First, I want to explore what these emotions create for us in terms of how they can keep us stuck and how they can perpetuate themselves in ways that truly make our current experience even more painful. I'm also going to get to the heart of what's causing these emotions for us, and I'll offer many examples from across the spectrum of The Empty Nest Straddle to show you the many ways that these painful emotions present themselves and how we unknowingly keep ourselves stuck in them. My goal is to not only help you understand your own emotional experience, but also to give you a glimpse of being part of a community where you're not alone in whatever way that you're experiencing these emotions.
So in this series, I'm going to explore the cause of these emotions, but even more importantly, I'm going to help give you a guide to how you can overcome these emotional obstacles. I'll offer you tools to help you understand whether these emotional obstacles are something that you need to learn to process or whether there's a way to learn to let go. And sometimes it's a combination of both.
What I hope to offer you is a glimpse into the unique power that each of us have within us to overcome these challenging emotions. It's a skill set that none of us were ever taught, but as you begin to understand the skill set, it's the same set of tools that you'll hear among all of the great motivational speakers, Tony Robbins, Byron Katie. It's a skill set that allows you to have power over your emotional well-being so that you don't have to feel stuck in any emotion in any way that keeps you from moving forward.
In this series, I'm also going to relate these lessons to the MOM archetype so that you can also connect some of the ways we stay stuck as they relate to our strengths and the mindset traps we can fall into. Think of it this way. The Incredible Hulk is incredibly powerful as a superhero, but when he's caught up in his rage, he often just creates a mess.
But when he channels his rational Bruce Banner while tapping into the strength of the Hulk, he's not only powerful, but he's effective at creating whatever outcome he wants to achieve. Now, I'm not calling you the Hulk, but mama, you are powerful and you have so many strengths. Imagine using them to create what you want in your life rather than falling into the vulnerabilities that sometimes come with your power.
In this series, I'm going to bring all of the work that I've done so far in the small jar together in a way that I hope resonates with you and shows you the power of mindset work in a new way. This is the work I do with my clients in my one-on-one coaching program, MOM 2.0. I work with each woman individually to help them understand their one obstacle, that emotion or series of emotions that's keeping them stuck. I teach my clients to deeply understand the real cause of their emotion and then give them the tools to build the bridge to the life and the emotional experience that they want more of in their life.
Having the power to create the life that you want in this moment is everything. But then think about the transformational impact of learning a process that's not just limited to this one emotion that you're experiencing right now, not limited to today's challenge that you're facing. The process I teach in MOM 2.0 is a powerful skill set that you can take with you throughout the rest of your life to be able to meet the emotional obstacles that we will all inevitably experience with a whole new level of self-trust and confidence.
Because you know exactly how to process and let go of painful, uncomfortable emotions, these obstacles will no longer keep you stuck. You'll be able to move through them and intentionally create peace, joy, connection, meaning, purpose, and love in your life. This is the heart of my coaching program MOM 2.0. It's not simply about solving the problems we have today with our teens.
It's not just about figuring out a new hobby or your career possibilities. It's not only about dealing with the sadness of the transition to the empty nest. MOM 2.0 will give you a whole new skill set that is so powerful that you'll be able to live into the best, happiest version of your life for the next 50 years.
Imagine the life-changing impact of that. I'll be giving you a taste of this impact in the upcoming One Obstacle series over the next few months, and I hope that you'll not only tune in but share this with friends so that we can empower each other to make the chapter ahead of all of us the best one yet. You have the power already within you to create this, my friend, and I'll show you how to access that power.
I'm so excited to get started with the series and look forward to helping you overcome your One Obstacle.
Until next time.
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.
