A 10 OUT OF 10 HOLIDAY
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 133.
Hello, my friend. As I was thinking about this episode, I realized it would come out right before Christmas and Hanukkah. And so I got to thinking about what message I would most like to share with you.
Honestly, I'm also thinking about what message would empower me most as I go into the holidays. In the past around this season, I've talked about being present and expectations. I also did an episode on the mindset traps of the holidays, all still very relevant messages.
But this year, I thought I'd explore a different perspective. Actually, let me start with a question for you. What would make this holiday a 10 out of 10 for you? Take a moment.
Think about what that is for you. What would be a 10 out of 10, an A plus, the perfect holiday? For me, based on where I am at the time I'm recording this, a 10 out of 10 would mean my son got into his early decision school. He's a senior and we're anxiously awaiting the news.
And as you can imagine, my mind is pretty preoccupied with that news right now. But looking ahead for sure, a 10 out of 10 would mean my son got that great news he's hoping for. As I think about other areas of my life, I think about my older son.
He'll be home from college. He'll be relieved to be done with his finals and he'll feel confident about how he did. He'll probably be thinking about applying to internships for the summer, but he'll feel confident about that too and he'll have a plan.
He'll also come home and he'll have decided on his major. Now, keep in mind, these are my hopes for a perfect holiday. I'm also thinking that both my boys would spend time with me.
A realistic amount. I'm not trying to be overly optimistic. I know they'll both want to spend time with friends.
I don't need to be greedy about it, but it would be nice to spend some quality time with them. Maybe some time with each of them one-on-one. A 10 out of 10 would mean we'd talk, that they'd open up to me and tell me how they're really doing.
Now again, remember, this is my holiday fantasy. So I'm imagining as they're talking to me and they're opening up to me, they're also telling me that they're doing great. That they're happy.
They're not anxious about anything. Totally confident about the future. They have their heads on straight.
They're focused on their goals, but not stressed out. I haven't even gotten to the holiday part yet. For sure, my boys would be happy to spend time with us and my whole family over Christmas.
We'd have engaging conversations over our dinners. We'd enjoy exchanging presents, although none of the gifts would have to be extravagant. It would be enough for us to be together, sharing laughs, even just doing the white elephant exchange we do with our $20 gifts, everyone participating.
I could go on about how I'd want everyone in my family to behave. I'd want my parents to be healthy. My boys to be patient with their younger cousins.
I'd want to be able to relax and enjoy the holiday. My friend, the picture I've just painted for you is make-believe. It's not impossible that any one of these things could happen.
It's just not likely that all of them will, at least not consistently over the next few weeks. The reality is sometimes life meets your expectations and sometimes it doesn't. Of course, we want to cherish these holidays, these moments with the people we love most.
We have hopes and expectations about how we're going to feel as we experience these moments, but so often it seems like our emotional experience is dependent on all of these things going our way, on our expectations being met. The holidays actually give us a really beautiful opportunity to examine this concept of expectations, about how dependent we can be on things going the way that we hope. Because look, we can tend to have really high hopes about the experience of the holidays we would like to have.
And so it's like we have these expectations on steroids. And from that perspective, it stands to reason that there's a lot more room for disappointment. I say often that we experience our lives through our emotions.
This is always true. But if your expectations are heightened over the holidays, maybe it makes sense that your emotional experience can feel heightened as well. I don't even think we're only dealing with our own expectations here.
Have you ever watched a holiday movie, one of those Hallmark movies, or heard other people talking about their holiday plans, and you think, it sounds like everyone else is having more fun this season than I am? There are so many opportunities to fall into the comparison trap. It's disheartening, to say the least, to think that other people are out there having more fun, connecting with their kids more, invited to more holiday parties than you are. So many different ways to judge our own experience as not quite enough.
And I don't know if you've experienced this, almost a sense of entitlement, like I should feel happier. It's the holidays. I'm supposed to feel full of joy and peace and gratitude.
You can feel gypped if this isn't your experience of the holidays. Whatever we're feeling, our brains tend to attribute that emotion to someone or something happening in our lives. We can think, I feel happy or mad because someone did this thing.
Or I feel this way because these things are going on in my life. Or maybe it's a matter of comparison. This thing is happening, but I wish it were different.
When we're feeling a negative emotion, we're typically associating that feeling with something that's either wrong in our lives or something that's wrong with us. And if you think about it, it makes sense that we do this. If we're feeling a kind of way, there has to be a reason, right? So our minds are looking for those reasons.
And if we're feeling a negative emotion, we ideally want to find a way to solve for that emotion so that we don't have to feel it anymore. And again, that also makes perfect sense. In fact, as I was thinking about this, I realized that you can even think about your emotional experience as a kind of grading system for how you're feeling about your life, or how you're viewing your life in relation to what you want.
Because we're always observing our lives. Whether you're conscious of it or not, your mind is constantly observing and judging the world around you, evaluating how you show up in relation to that world. And your brain is constantly making judgments about what's working and what's not working.
So let's think about how this might work in practice over the next couple days and weeks of the holiday. Your mind is going to observe everything that's happening. As one example, one of the first places our minds go is our kids.
So our brains are constantly scanning them for data, for information. And when it comes to our kids, we have in our mind a kind of rubric. You might have heard one of your kids' teachers talk about rubrics.
And if you're a teacher, you know, they're an evaluation tool or a set of guidelines that teachers use to communicate expectations to their students. So it's like they say to their students, this is what I hope you'll learn. And this is the standard I'm going to use to assess whether or not you've learned what I taught you.
The beauty of a rubric is that it's a way for a teacher to communicate expectations ahead of time. And then of course, they can also grade students based on this consistent set of criteria. I think we as moms also have a rubric in our minds for our kids.
We're constantly evaluating them based on a set of standards that we have in our minds. And there are criteria we have in our minds for how well our kids are meeting these standards. It sounds kind of funny when you think about it this way, but consider that all of the expectations that you have for your child and the different criteria or factors that you look out for to assess whether or not they're meeting your expectations.
This is essentially your brain's way of grading how well they're doing, whether or not they're meeting your standards, really the hopes that you have for them. The rubric includes criteria for what it means in our minds for our kids to be happy, for them to be safe and healthy, to be fulfilling the minimum hopes and expectations we have for them and the way that they'll lead their lives. And even though we think of the holidays as a time to rest and take a break, we still have expectations of our kids.
I mean, for certain, if you have a high school senior like I do, and if they're disappointed in the early decision process, or maybe they haven't finished deciding what comes next for them or applying to all of their schools, then for sure over the next couple of weeks, you're going to have some very specific expectations about how they show up as they continue their journey on the process of what comes next for them. Maybe your kid is home from college and you have some expectations of them in terms of what they might be doing to get ahead of getting an internship for the summer. Or maybe you're hoping to have a conversation with them about what they're going to do after they graduate.
Even if your child doesn't have any specific deliverables or things that they need to accomplish over the next couple of weeks, notice how you could still have expectations about how much time they spend with you and how often they go out and what time they should come home, whether or not they're drinking or doing drugs or spending time with a particular set of friends. So just with your teen alone, you can have a very complicated rubric or set of expectations that your brain is judging reality against. And your brain literally does this on autopilot.
You don't even have to think intentionally about it. Now taking this analogy a bit further, if you're talking about a rubric a teacher grades against in school, typically they communicate that in some way, or more specifically, they communicate the expectations they have about their students. You could be a more strict or a more lenient teacher.
But at the end of the day, whatever standard you apply to the grading, you're most likely not going to make it about you if a student doesn't achieve a high grade on an assignment you're grading. Think about it. They don't make it about them.
Now, of course, the best teachers might reflect on how they can better support a student if they find someone in their class is struggling. But still, they're most likely not going to take the student's failure personally. What they'll probably do is give the student guidance about what they can do differently to get a different grade.
But ultimately, it's still up to the student to do that work. And again, they're most likely not going to take it personally if the student chooses not to do the work or put in the effort to get a better grade. Okay, so we moms, like a teacher, are applying a rubric.
Some method of assessment. And look, it's not just us moms. And it's not just about our kids.
We humans are all grading the experience of our lives at all times. This isn't a sign that there's something wrong with us. And this isn't a judgment about us.
This is just the truth. It's our mind's way of understanding the world around us, of experiencing the world. If we didn't have some internal rubric about the way we think things are supposed to be, then how would we ever be able to know what we do like or what we don't like? It starts with our value system.
What we consider right and wrong. The things that are important to us, like kindness and honesty. We all have this internal system of values that allows us to essentially grade the experience of our lives and the role other people play in it.
And keep in mind that we all have a different rubric. What might be important to you could be very different than what's important to your teen or your husband or your mother-in-law. I've talked before about how we can all have our own perspective about our lives.
Essentially, a unique interpretation of what all the components of our life mean. And let's take this one step further to think about this perspective as a rubric, a grading system. And the grade, my friend, the measure of the grade that we're giving to the experience of our lives is our emotional well-being.
And notice how I say the grade we give is our feeling. So when we assess our teen's behavior and we give that behavior a D, that grade doesn't equate to something we give them. That D is literally an emotion that we feel.
We can't give them the D of our emotional experience, although we try by lecturing them or nagging them to do better. The grade we give our assessment of our life is our emotion. Look, when our kids go to school, they are theoretically signed up for the concept that they have to earn grades.
Whether they like it or not, whether they like school or not, they probably conceptually buy into the idea that they should at least do well enough to graduate from high school. They understand that their grades are their responsibility. But is our emotional experience also their responsibility? Is it my child's responsibility to do what I want him to do so that I can have a positive emotional experience? Is life obligated to go the way I hope so I can feel better? Because this is kind of what we're asking.
We're asking our teens and everything else in our life to perfectly align to our internal rubric so that we can give our life an A. And that A equates to our feelings of happiness and peace. Notice how often we wait for life to perfectly align with our hopes and expectations just so we can feel happy. And also notice how our ability to feel happy and at peace, to achieve that A, how this then becomes completely out of our control to achieve because we're waiting for the circumstances of our lives to align with that rubric.
My youngest son, as I said, is a senior, and he's been going through the college process. As I record this podcast, he is days away from hearing about his first choice college. I'll be honest, I've been thinking a lot about this over the past few days, and the waiting is excruciating.
When he submitted his application and we had weeks to wait, I wasn't thinking about it at all. But now that the decision is days away, it's like it's all that we can think about. I'm also highly attuned to my son's emotional state.
I'm constantly looking for signs that he's doing okay, looking for opportunities for me to help and support him. I also notice my urges to ask him questions to get more information about how he's doing. I've got this internal rubric around his emotional state and what I'd like it to be.
My rubric allows for the possibility that he's nervous about the decision to come, as I am. But it's like I'm also looking for clues that he's handling the stress okay. I'd ideally like to hear that he knows he's going to be okay no matter what happens.
I'm cognizant of the fact that I would love for him to have a positive outcome because I want him to be happy and he's worked so hard for this. I would love him to be able to feel the joy of that success in a few days. And frankly, I'd also love for him to be able to enjoy the holidays without needing to submit 10-15 more college applications.
But if I'm really honest, it's also about me, about the joy and pride I will get to feel when he gets in. And look, I feel certain he'll get into a great school. What I don't know is whether I'll know which school that is in a few days or a few months.
If I'm honest, I'd love to have certainty, to know that we can get to the part of just enjoying the time we have together during his senior year, to dial down the stress. I want that for my son, but I want it for me as well. How often are you taking ownership of the grade you give your life? In other words, how often are you taking ownership of your emotional experience? My friend, your brain is constantly scanning the reality of your life, really your perception of the reality of your life, against your internal rubric.
And your emotional experience is the grade that you're giving, what you're observing and interpreting about your life. On a day-to-day basis, how often are you giving your life an A? A 10 out of 10. The truth is, I think so many of us operate at a B or a C level as a baseline.
Based on the rubric, we're doing okay, surviving, not great and not terrible, getting through it, just average. And then we have these moments of stress or anxiety and we dip below that, maybe even a C minus or a D, moments where we're in the F range. And then we get ourselves back up to the C or a B and we're back to okay.
My friend, if your kid was consistently getting Cs in every class at school and you knew they were capable of getting better grades, would you be content with letting them just ride the Cs? Or would you try to encourage them to make a little more effort, to put in the work to reach their potential? I'm guessing that you wouldn't stand by and accept it if your child wasn't living up to what you thought they were capable of. So my friend, let me do the same for you. You are capable of living a 10 out of 10 life, but it's going to require you to take responsibility for your emotional experience.
What does that look like? First, it requires you to take ownership of your internal rubric. Be aware of that internal system of values and judgments that you're applying to everyone and everything in your life. Get really curious.
This actually doesn't even mean you have to drop your expectations or in any way change your values, but it does mean that you need to take responsibility for your expectations and your values as yours. Just because you have expectations doesn't mean anyone is obligated to meet them. Your emotional experience is your grade.
It's not a grade that anyone else is obligated to earn. As you go through this holiday, notice what you're thinking would constitute an A-plus experience. Those moments when your kid says, I love you out of the blue, your teen giving you an unexpected hug, or that they make a comment about how maybe you were right, or that they appreciate something you did.
Maybe you'll even catch your teen in the act of doing something incredibly kind for somebody else without having been asked. I don't know about you, but when I'm not conscious about it, the things that I would grade an A-plus with my teens aren't even in my rubric. It's like these moments so exceed my expectations that I don't even want to set expectations around them.
Like a rainbow, you're so happy when you see it, but you're not going to go around looking for it. These moments are indeed precious, and for some of us in our lives with our teens, they might be relatively rare. So I guess the question is, do we have to wait for these behaviors, these things outside of us, which we have absolutely no control over? Do we have to wait for other people to exceed our expectations, to feel joy? Over the holidays, it's quite likely that you'll be around your kid more than you are in your regular life.
Maybe your college kid will be back home, or your high school kid will at least be out of school and likely around the house more. Even if they're locked in their room the whole time, they'll likely be in your vicinity a bit more. So notice that it's likely you have in your rubric some expectation about how much time you'll be spending with them and what that time looks like.
And because your teen is going to be in your orbit a bit more, there will also be more opportunities for you to collect data. I actually remember thinking when my son came home from college that first time, I remember consciously thinking, oh this was actually easier when he was in college because I didn't have all this data to worry about. If he was stressed out at college or going out with friends, doing whatever he was doing, when he was at college, it was a bit like out of sight out of mind.
But when they're back home, now you've got all this data you're observing, and your brain is grading that data against your rubric and giving it a grade. Then cue your emotional response. My friend, this is a sign that your brain is working perfectly normally.
But what you might not realize is that you have the ability to take responsibility for your emotional experience by understanding your interpretation of your life, why you consider it good or bad, and also for making a conscious decision about how you want to feel about your life. For me, over the upcoming holiday, I want to challenge this tendency for us to live in a B or C experience. Why does the base case have to be just okay? Just getting through, experiencing brief, unexpected moments of joy.
This does not mean I'm planning to gratitude shame myself, that I'm going to force myself to be happy when I'm not. I remember during the time I was really struggling in my relationship with my older son, I was living in an experience of emotional pain. The reality of life is that sometimes it doesn't meet our expectations, and we're not going to be okay with that.
There are some times where you're not going to just look on the bright side. We can be honest with ourselves about that. But what I actively did during that painful period was that I took responsibility for my emotional experience.
I recognized that I was assessing my son based on what I wanted from him. I wanted him to be not pushing me away. I wanted him to not be in a relationship I viewed as toxic.
But all of that was about me. What I wanted. What my son wanted and needed at the time was different.
I could have easily taken that personally. I could have been angry and resentful at him. And don't get me wrong, I had those moments too.
I just realized that the only impact of me thinking that he should be living up to my expectations was that I was losing the beauty of the relationship I had with my son. I took responsibility for my rubric and knew it was about me. But I could also see that my son's choices and behaviors were all about him, and frankly not at all about me.
Our kids are these beautiful, evolving, still-unformed humans. They might look like adults, but they are still frantically trying to figure themselves out. It's messy, and it doesn't always look like what we want it to look like.
But also, their emotional experience and the actions that they take in their lives, that's all about their own internal rubric and grading system for their lives. They're still figuring all of that out. I wonder as moms if we spent less time worrying about our own rubric and how what we see in our teen's life doesn't meet our expectations, and instead took a moment to be in awe of the beauty of watching our kids develop their own grading system.
Even if it looks really messy right now, it's actually incredibly beautiful to see it all unfold. In our life with our kids, we are going to experience many seasons, and we may be in a messy one. But if we actually expected that to be true, if we actually incorporate into our own rubric an expectation that our kids are figuring it all out in their own way, I wonder if we, like the teacher, might take the grade we give our kids a little less personally.
And also know it's ultimately not our kid's job to earn an A from us. They need to earn their own A+, and they are the only ones who can give it to themselves. My friend, as you approach this holiday, be aware of the rubric that you're using to judge every aspect of the experience.
Whether with your kids or other relatives, with your to-do list, the state of your home, whatever. Your rubric, your interpretation of your life, and the grade you give that experience, that will determine your emotional state. Is an A or an A+, too much to expect? I wonder if you didn't need everyone else to meet your expectations so that you could experience this holiday as a 10 out of 10, what would that look like? For me, that doesn't even require me to be happy all of the time.
For me, an A+, is being very intentional with how I curate my emotional experience. Whatever comes with this college decision, I'm going to make room for my sons and my own disappointment, if that's what comes. But I'm also going to intentionally lean into the belief that everything will work out okay.
I actually expect my oldest to come home being stressed. I'm going to be here to love him and support him, but I'm not going to need him to not be stressed so that I can feel okay. Over Thanksgiving, I set a boundary and I disappointed a few of my family members.
I felt a twinge of remorse because I don't ever want to hurt people I love, but I also intentionally decided to let them feel what they needed to feel about my boundary. I can both love myself and hold true to what I need, and give others the grace to feel what they need to feel about it. At any moment, you can ask yourself the question, what can I do right now to make this moment a 10 out of 10 for me? Is it a boundary I need to set? Is it an expectation I need to drop? Maybe a way you need to reframe your interpretation of what's happening.
It could even be a choice to intentionally drop a judgment you have about yourself. Maybe permission to let yourself feel what you really need to feel, but also know that emotion is about you and it's not anyone else's fault. For me, a 10 out of 10 is quite simply taking ownership of my emotional experience.
I create the rubric. The grade I give my life is in my control. It may not always be an A+, but in any moment, I can evaluate what is in my control and choose to create that A-plus for myself.
My friend, I wish you a 10 out of 10 holiday. Empower yourself to create the experience of your life that you want. This isn't about being happy all the time.
It's about trusting yourself to weather the storms and steer your ship toward the beauty.
Happy holidays, my friend.
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.
