Ep #105: Become the Calm Mom with Michelle Grosser

[music] Mikki: Welcome to Co-Parenting with Confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who wanna move past the conflict and frustration of divorce and show up as the mom they truly wanna be. My name's Mikki Gardner. I'm a certified life and conscious parenting coach with my own personal dose of co-parenting experience. Throughout my co-parenting journey, I have learned to become confident in who I am as a woman and a mother. And I'm here to help you do the same. If you're ready to learn what it takes to become a great co-parent and an amazing example to your children, well, get ready, and let's dive into today's episode. [music] Mikki: Welcome back to Co-Parenting with Confidence. I am really excited for today because I have an amazing woman who is coming on to share so much wisdom and calm, and is so generous with her time and expertise. Her name is Michelle Grosser and she is a nervous system expert, certified master life coach, and the host of the Calm Mom podcast. She's really unique because she is teaching us how, through somatic and neuroscience-based modalities, she can help you figure out how to discover what's really going on beneath the triggers and emotions, so that you can start healing yourself and finding peace in the present. And I know that she and I are so aligned on so many things because it really is about awareness and presence and finding peace and creating calm, even in that chaos. So I'm really excited to share Michelle with you. You can find everything in the show notes, but without further ado, let's dive into this healing and inspiring conversation. Oh, moms, I'm super excited about today's conversation. We have an amazing guest. Michelle Grosser is here. Hi and welcome. Michelle: Hi. Thanks for having me. I'm super pumped too. This is gonna be awesome. Mikki: Oh, this is gonna be awesome. So she is the host of the Calm Mom podcast, which I said before, but there's so much to unpack, which I want to get into. But first I'd love to hear a little bit about you from your perspective and how you got here. Michelle: Yeah. So I'm Michelle Grosser. I live in Miami. I'm the mom of two girls. They're five and six and a half. I'm married. In this season of life I'm wearing so many hats, [laughter] it's kind of wild. But I am doing the Calm Mom podcast and helping women understand how their nervous system functions and how they can grow in their regulation. I am a practicing attorney, so that's been what I've been doing for the last 12 years. And I'm still running a law firm and practicing law, less than I was but I still am. And my husband and I actually planted a church here in Miami about a year and a half ago. So we are running... Mikki: Oh gosh. Michelle: Midweek ministries, and it's just wild. And there's a lot going on. And I am so grateful that I discovered this nervous system work [laughter] before all of this stuff landed on my plate as it would because five, six years ago I was just so burnt out. And I was so in my head and I was so disconnected from my body. And I was... I think my paradigms around myself and life and achievement and career and emotions. Like, I had just such skewed labels, I think, on so many of these things that I thought were good or bad or strong or weak or all these things I was just blind to. And I was just having recurring miscarriages. And it was just like, I couldn't explain why I felt so awful and why my body didn't seem to be doing the things that I wanted it to do. Michelle: And I kind of had this 3:00 AM epiphany, right when the pandemic started, that a lot of women in my circle were also expressing that they were feeling burnt out and exhausted and overwhelmed. And I just, I don't know. I just felt this really strong call to resource and help them in some way. And I signed up for a yearlong coaching certification program thinking that I would be getting tools to help women and completely missing the fact that my whole world would be turned upside down in the best way. And I have just grown so much and become so passionate about this work that I'm really looking to phase out my law practice over the next 12 to 18 months and do this full time because it just lights me up. And I'm so grateful to be here to scream it from the rooftops because it really is so powerful. Mikki: Oh my gosh. Well, I know that, especially for my audience, that there is something that we can resonate with so much of your story, but the burnt out, the exhaustion, and the overwhelm, because if there is one thing that the pandemic did for all of us, but I think divorce or trauma or any of these kind of things that happen, right? It's like the rug gets pulled out from under you. And you lose your footing. And so I would love for you to talk about sort of the somatic and neuroscience, what's going on to help us, because you've really become an expert in how to do this. And so I would love for you to sort of share some of those tools. 'Cause I know so many of the moms that listen to this just feel so overwhelmed and burnt out by trying to keep it all together. Michelle: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, there's a good reason why we all feel this way. [laughter] It's because we're all holding the world on our shoulders in ways that we're just not designed to function. And I think so many of our coping mechanisms and our defense strategies are things that we've been doing for decades probably, and not even realizing that there's a cost to them. They've been serving a purpose and fueling us in some ways. Things like our perfectionism or overachieving or all of these different things that we've picked up that we think are personality patterns or just how we are, but that they really are just covering so much that's going on beneath the surface. And a lot of the work that I do somatically and with the nervous system is that most of the people that I coach that come across my desk, they think they have a capacity problem or they wanna increase their capacity. Right? I wanna be able to handle life because we know motherhood's not just going to get easier. Michelle: Life doesn't just get easier. It keeps coming. And we want to be able to experience all of that and hold all of that. But we want to be able to do it from a place where we are feeling regulated and do have access to the parts of our brain that make us the best human beings that we can be. So a lot of the work is just teaching that. And when it comes from a nervous system perspective, I think women in western culture, particularly mothers are just so chronically stressed without I think even understanding the level of stress that we're under. And when our body perceives, when our body and our brain perceive a threat, our body doesn't really do a good job at distinguishing or differentiating a real threat and a perceived threat. So for whatever reason we're living in this chronic state of feeling as if we're under threat and our brain is continuously releasing these hormones and these chemicals to help mobilize us. Michelle: And because we don't actually have to run from a lion or whatever it is, we're not actually fighting or fleeing, that we're not metabolizing all that stuff as we're intended to. And it has an impact on our nervous system. It has an impact on our entire way of being. It has an impact on how we see things. It has an impact on our hypervigilance. It has an impact on our emotional hygiene. It has an impact on so many ways we're showing up. So when we can learn, I know you talk about this a lot too, but really growing in our awareness of where we are in the state of our nervous system. I always say we can't intervene in a world we can't see, right? Awareness always precedes choice. So if I want to be able to make a choice and say, is this serving me? I actually have to be aware that it exists. So knowing a lot of nervous system regulation work is really just growing in our education and our awareness of what's going on in our body. Michelle: Our body is constantly communicating with us, but we live in a society where we want to kill the messenger instead of listen to the message. So we go, what? I mean, there's things that are good also. Like we go get a massage or go to the chiropractor when we're having neck pain or back pain. But very rarely do we take the time to actually see what our body might be communicating to us through that. Or things like headache or gut issues, right? They're rampant. Run across women every day who are like, I have such bad bloating or IBS or gas. And I'm like, I don't think we realize the effect that the state of our nervous system has on the physiology and the function of our body. So it's really long-winded answer [laughter] I think to what you're asking, but just the tie I think between how we're showing up, how we want to show up, and how our nervous system is really foundational and all of that is some of the work that I'm doing. Mikki: Amazing. And I love this. I want to unpack it a little bit more. 'Cause I think there's a lot of terms you're using and I want to be able to sort of like... For everybody to be able to understand this. 'Cause I think we're all sort of just coming to this. We hear a lot right now about nervous system work and regulation, but what does this look like on a practical level? Could you give us some like sort of down in the dirt kind of examples? Michelle: Yeah. So there's three states to our nervous system. So there's that regulated state that's our homeostasis. That's when we do have access to our prefrontal cortex, that learning part of our brain that handles communication and our ability to see things from different perspectives and all these different things. That's when we feel that cool, calm, collected, we can access curiosity and compassion and all of these things. And then there's two different states, two different neural circuits that are dysregulated states. So one is when we're in a sympathetic state and how does that feel? That shows up when we're feeling activated or anxious or triggered or angry when we have those heightened states of stress. That's the fight or flight state. And then the other dysregulated state is kind of like the other end of that spectrum. Michelle: It's where our body has experienced so much stress that as a protective measure it actually kind of shuts down. That's the free state. When we talk about feeling burnt out or dissociated or disconnected from our body, there's a lot of times that we can be hard on ourselves as moms that we've had a lazy day or we're procrastinating. And when we get curious, we realize, hey, I'm actually in a functional free state. This is not procrastination or laziness because I'm just like, I don't have enough motivation. There's actually something way deeper here that's going on in my nervous system. So those are the three neural circuits. But then as far as how they manifest in the day-to-day, there are emotional and mental and physical symptoms of being dysregulated. Michelle: And so many of these, I think we've just come to assume are either how we are or they're just like normal par for the course. I'm just like a working mom with a really stressful life. So I have talked about gut issues or insomnia or hair loss or on the emotional side, right? I'm just like having all of these emotional outbursts or I have a lot of brain fog, or I walk into a room and don't remember why I was there or experience a lot of anxiety. I have this masterclass that I teach and it has like, I don't know, 30 or 40 different symptoms and many women leave that space and they're like, every single one of those are just things that I've been experiencing that I thought were just like, that's just what happens when you grow up and have a lot of stuff to do. But I'm just here to remind everyone that it's not. Mikki: Yeah. I love this so much because I think that's the one thing that I see is, when you get divorced, people don't get divorced for happy reasons typically. Right? And it's because of trauma, betrayal, pain, something has happened. And so that puts you into a dysregulated state, any of those things happening. And then we are expected to parent our children at the exact same time. And so I love what you're talking about and what you're teaching and guiding people through because had I known that when I was going through it to be able to be aware of sort of where am I at, what's going on within my body. Michelle: Yeah. Mikki: Because then like you said, it's like we can't change what we're not aware of. We have to first start there. And so it's really, I love that you're bringing this to the conversation so that we can start to understand some of these things that are going on and these challenges that moms are facing. Michelle: Yeah. Yeah. And I think we're just hit with so much. I mean, we're, we're overstimulated. [chuckle] We are over-functioning. There's so many of these overs coming that we're not well supported in all of it. So it's like the overs and the unders, it's like we're overstimulated. We're over-functioning. We're expected to all these things, but we're under-resourced and we're under cared for and we're under slept and all of these things. So the balance is just so... It's tough. Mikki: Yeah. And I can only imagine that this... I'm curious sort of the impact that learning all of this work, what it's had on your life, but I can't help but imagine how it has positively impacted your ability to see your children and be there for your children. Michelle: Yeah. Huge. I was someone who six, seven years ago was actually proud of the fact that I wasn't one of those emotional women. Like, I never cried. I could watch sad movies. I didn't cry. I wasn't dramatic. And I had this idea that that was such like a good, strong thing because I had this misunderstanding that emotions were weak and there's just so much conditioning and patterning in all of that and how I was raised, but really allowing myself to grow in my, you know, I call it emotional hygiene now, but just the ability to be hygienic in my emotions. They have such a huge impact. Michelle: That energy on how we function and when we're constantly repressing them or suppressing them, that's actually not strong. It's actually the opposite. It was holding me back in so many ways. So I'm so grateful now with young children, young girls, that man, the conversations we have around their emotions and how things are showing up in their body and being able to help teach and guide them to express those in ways that are hygienic, that are healthy for them to be able to put language to how they're feeling, for them to able to hold space for each other and for their friends has been a huge shift. And then the same, even in my marriage, it's been a huge, just functioning closely with another adult is a wild ride. [chuckle] Mikki: It is. Michelle: It's a wild ride. And it's so funny because my husband and I were married for eight or nine years, I think, before we had kids. And I remember always hearing people talk about like, marriage is hard, and I never really got it. I was like, man, this seems easy. I was in law school, I'd come home, we'd have dinner at 11:00 PM, we'd all just do our own thing. It was fine. Then we had kids and I'm like, oh, this is so hard. [laughter] This is so hard. So really growing in my understanding of just the nervous system and how we've all experienced our own traumas, whether we're conscious to them or not, and the impact that they have on how we show up and function. It's just allowed me to be a better human, I think. Mikki: Yeah. Yeah, I think what you and I both teach really, it's just adulting skills. It's humaning skill, right? Like learning how to really take care of yourself and an adult. But can you tell us a little bit more? I love the term sort of be hygienic in your emotions. What does that mean? Michelle: Yeah, so emotions are energy and motion, right? Emotion are energy and motion, and a lot of those bigger emotions are just more energetically charged. But they are energy. So if we are consistently suppressing or repressing our emotional expression, it has an impact on our body. There is a cost to holding all of that energy in. It is, if you would imagine holding like a really filled up beach ball underwater, right? It's like it takes energy and effort to do that. And you could only do it so long before it starts to seep out or kind of splash out on people who aren't the intended [laughter] recipient of all of that emotional energy to begin with. So really I think starting to just get in touch with the things that we're feeling. I think we run at such a pace in this day and age that we are so out of touch with our emotions. We don't slow down enough to really pay attention to our emotions and our emotions are information. Michelle: So allowing us to... A big area of growth for me was really changing my mindset around it and greeting everything that came up with curiosity instead of judgment. I was so out of touch with things like anger and sadness and grief and just putting on a front and there was a cost to that in my body. So allowing ourselves to express a lot of these things. I think as women, as moms, as women trying to co-parent kids, there is so... There's like an epidemic, I believe, of how we deal with the emotion of anger as women. I think it's so... A lot of us fall in one of two ends of the spectrum, is that either all of our anger just comes out on everyone around us without much control or it's the opposite and we're just holding all of it in, all of that rage and neither of which are healthy expressions. So just allowing ourselves and creating space for ourselves to actually feel our body to feel safe enough that it can express these emotions without fear of being unsafe or retribution or anything. Michelle: And then the interesting thing about all of that is that when you create space, energetic space like that, it grows your window of tolerance, which means you can actually handle more without becoming dysregulated. You can handle more without snapping. It's why one day it can take your kids 30 minutes to put their shoes on and you're like, I got this, and you have these beautiful parenting moments, and you're so regulated and high-fiving yourself. And then the next day, that same exact thing happens and you just snap and you don't have the patience for it. And it's because there's been a fluctuation in your window of tolerance, in your capacity. And when you allow yourself to make space emotionally and release a lot of that, it does huge work in growing the capacity of your nervous system to handle different stimuli, whatever is coming at you. Mikki: I love that you just pointed that out, right? Because it's one thing that we talk a lot about on this podcast is learning how to stay calm in the chaos, right? And so it's not about learning how to control it. Michelle: No. Mikki: What you're saying, which I love, is really growing your capacity to be okay, no matter what's happening, to sort of have yourself and have your back to be able to build up your capability and your capacity to do that. I think that's so beautiful. And when you were talking, I'm interested in sort of what your journey was, but so many of us, and I always like to sort of remind moms, we have, whether it is culturally in your family, generationally been told that we are to be seen and not heard. Like you said, you weren't one of those "emotional women" because they are seen as very, very bad. Right? And so the good mom is the one who's taking care of everyone at her own expense in silence with a smile on her face, and that is a recipe for disaster. And I think that's... I just want everyone to keep that reminder that you're getting the messaging 24/7 that isn't in your best interest, and that's why I love what you're doing, is shedding some light on no, we need to change the narrative, we need to shift the paradigm to what's actually going on. Michelle: Yeah, even the name of the podcast, The Calm Mom, I struggled with that a lot because I'm like, "Am I contributing to this pressure that moms feel to be calm all the time?" And so I try to talk about it as much as I can, because if that is your expectation or that is your goal that I'm just gonna be calm mom all the time, you gotta let that go because not only is it impossible because you are a human being, but it's so toxic, it's so bad for your body to feel like it needs to be calm all the time, because that's actually not a healthy nervous system. Michelle: A healthy nervous system is not calm all the time, a healthy nervous system is resilient. So I can experience the full range of human emotion. If you mute anger and grief, you will also mute joy and pleasure and all of these other things you wanna experience. So I wanna be able to experience everything, and I do get triggered and there are things that happen that make me very angry or very sad, but now that I have this toolbox, I don't get stuck there. And I think that's the story, right? It's like I have tools, I have information that I can use to bring myself back to regulation so much quicker. Mikki: I love that. Yeah, that's such an important distinction. I think it's really... Right, we don't wanna be, we think we do. It's like this idea that our kids should be... I just wanna raise a happy kid. Really? You want them to be happy about everything? There's a lot of stuff in the world that I don't wanna be happy about. Right? Michelle: Things don't change if we're happy about everything. Mikki: No, that's complacency. Right? And while you were talking, I was just thinking, it breaks my heart. I live in Michigan, driving home now, every billboard is about marijuana or alcohol or casinos or any of the things. And Listen, everything in moderation, I'm not making a judgment on it, but there's also this idea that, to your point, we just need to stay calm, we just need to take the edge off. It's like, whatever, when... It's really learning, do we wanna learn to do that by doing something outside of ourselves or do we wanna take the time to do the work to figure out how do I regulate myself internally? Mikki: Because that is the most powerful place we can come from. And then you get to teach your children how to do it because you are the living, breathing, walking example of what it looks like to be a mom, to be a wife, to be an ex-wife, to be a friend, a woman, all the things. And so I'm so grateful for the work you're doing because I think there needs to be more and more conversation around this because we're getting more and more messaging, take the pill, do the surgery, do the thing. And we're getting... We've got to change that paradigm of being able to talk about, well, what can you do for yourself? Michelle: Yeah, I couldn't agree more. A lot of those are right, we're numbing out. Mikki: Yeah, we're numbing. Michelle: Even with when I teach about nervous system regulation, a lot of times I'll be asked like, okay, so when I am feeling anxious and when I am feeling burnt out, what are some body-based exercises that I can do to bring myself back to being regulated? And I feel like I wanna share some of these things, but then I always wonder how helpful is that because to a certain extent, that's also a band-aid. What we wanna be able to do is actually get beneath that big picture-wise and be like, hey, why am I getting to that state to begin with, right? If I'm feeling anxious every day, it's awesome to have tools in the moment that can help me feel calmer, but if I'm waking up anxious every day, there's something probably bigger than that that we wanna be... Like the deeper levels I guess of that healing and that curiosity and that growth. That's where we really find change. Mikki: Yeah, I think what you're talking about is really building yourself that toolbox of having so many different things, but what you're talking about is learning to become the skilled worker who can use all the tools, who can integrate them, who knows how to sort of... All the workings around it. And those band-aids are necessary, because for the mom who's sitting here listening to this saying, okay, I know that I'm overwhelmed, I know that I'm burnt out. But what the heck do I do about it? Right? What's the first step that you would say to her, if you could say one thing or two things, what can she do? Because if she sees change there, she'll take a step to another tool. And so I think it's like that curiosity and breadcrumbs. So what's a couple of breadcrumbs you would offer to her? Michelle: That's great. Okay, so I think the first thing is understanding that our body doesn't speak a verbal language. So I think so often we'll talk about what's going on, or when's the last time you were feeling super anxious or had this big event where you had to public-speak or something and you kind of told yourself like, "Just calm down, it's not a big deal, you're safe, you got this, you're prepared, just calm down." It doesn't really work, it's not particularly effective to tell our bodies to experience certain things 'cause our body speaks, it doesn't speak a verbal language. It speaks in non-verbal language. So we have to actually show it that it's safer. Whether we're feeling dissociated and burnt out and disconnected or whether we're feeling anxious or angry or activated, our body is seeking safety. So what are some ways we can show our body that it is safe without telling it in words? Michelle: Our body responds to movement really well, really well. And from a nervous system perspective, you don't need to go to CrossFit, but just getting in 10 minutes of movement a day, however that looks. Maybe some days it's just yoga and stretching, maybe some days you feel like you can do run a far distance or do a hard hit workout or something like that. Doing that consistently, just 10 minutes will make a huge difference. Our body responds really well to gentle, and appropriate touch. So things like even crossing your hands and putting your hands on your shoulders and havening and squeezing up and down your arms can bring a lot of safety to your body. In the same position, butterfly-tapping, just crossing your arms in front of you on your chest, and stimulating both sides of your brain with bilateral touch, and your physiology brings a lot of calm to a lot of people. Getting out of your head if you're someone who tends to ruminate or have looping thoughts. Mikki: No, I've never done that. I've never done that, Michelle. Michelle: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what you're talking about, especially not at 3:00 in the morning, just getting out of your head and into your body by making your hand into like a fist, and then tapping at a pressure that feels safe for you for one or two minutes along your arms, your chest, your core, your legs, really powerful in getting your body out of the looping and ruminating in your brain and into the sensations of your body. That's why yoga can be really helpful for people, even just stretching, we hold so much tension and trauma really in our hips and a lot of our joints, so just kind of moving in that way. Breath, our body really responds to breath. So a lot of times you'll notice that when we feel activated, what happens with our breath? It becomes shallow, it becomes quick, it's all our physiology preparing for fight or flight. Michelle: So if we send the signal, not so much with our inhales, but with really slow exhales, that tells our body, hey, we don't need to activate right now. Whether it's a perceived threat or a real threat, right? We're telling our body, it's safe, we don't need to be in a stress response right now. Dance I think is underrated. Part of the 10 minutes of movement I tell my clients is like, man, twice a day, three times a day, just blast your favorite song and dance. Watch what that does for your nervous system, it's amazing. And then, I guess within that, those are I think some great tools, your body responds to temperature change also. So sometimes just taking a hot shower or taking cool, like putting your face in a bowl of ice water or taking frozen vegetables from the freezer and holding it on the back of your neck. Michelle: If you're feeling dissociated or you're feeling like you're spacing out or numbing out or having a hard time finding motivation. Or however it is that you frame that feeling when you're just not present and there, that can really help your vagus nerve that runs from the base of your brain to all of your major organs. It really responds to temperature, so that's something that can be really helpful too. Holding ice cubes in your hands or on your wrist can really help a lot of people when they're feeling anxious. So those are all kind of tools that you can use in the moment. And what I love about that, especially for us as moms, is no one has time for this two-hour routine, but the more that you do things like this and it is bio-individual in the sense that everyone responds differently to certain things, our nervous systems are different, but I have a list of different regulation resources. Michelle: And I just tell people, man, try something, and then if it works put it in your back pocket and use it again. And if it doesn't seem to work and your nervous system doesn't seem to respond, it's no harm no foul, it's just information and you can try something different the next time. But I guess the last thing I'll say on that with our nervous system is that it doesn't require variety in order to regulate. So a lot of times clients will come to me and be like, okay, give me like, I want 10 things that I can do. And I'm like, that's actually dis-regulation in wanting all of the different variety, but to allow yourself to sit and do the same thing over and over, knowing that it brings regulation to your system can be so powerful and the variety that your system actually seeks comes in the depth of that resource. Not necessarily having 20 different resources. So we can just do something simple for one minute or 30 seconds and really be able to shift everything. Mikki: Thank you for sharing all those because there's so many that are great. I'm gonna try all of them, probably tomorrow, 'cause I'm sure I'll be triggered just like everybody else. And I couldn't help but... I mean, one of the things that I love is how strong your work is around intentionality, and I think that to me was such a good connection too. It's really about just choosing and staying consistent, like you're talking about, and deepening. So I'd love to hear your thoughts more on intentionality and how that impacts this work and your nervous system. Michelle: Yeah, yeah, I think that's a great question. And I think, I guess I have a couple of cliches that just came to mind now, and I'm gonna say them and then I'll talk more about it. How we do one thing is how we do everything. Mikki: Of course. Yes, yeah. Michelle: We hear that a lot and it's true. And then I think the other cliche I'm gonna drop on you is like, we either live by default or by design. So if we are not being intentional about the things that we're doing, the things that we're thinking, the things that we're saying, the ways in which we're being, we're gonna fall back to the lowest hanging fruit, and that's usually not the stuff that serves us well. We're operating then from our coping mechanisms and our defense strategies and our patterning, and that's not conscious. That's a lot of the work that you teach. It's not conscious. So intentionality in our nervous system, our nervous systems thrive in order and routine, so that requires a certain level of intention. For myself, I have noticed it to be true that the first thought I have in the morning is often the last thought I have the night before. Michelle: So I try to be really intentional about that time in my day, the first hour in my day and the last hour in my day. There's a lot that happens between that, but if I can at least grow in my intention in the first in last hours, usually those are times I can be alone without my children. So I think that's probably a good place to start if you're looking to grow in your intention. And then, man, I'm in Miami and I'm looking out my window right now and it's full of palm trees. And I just feel like that's such a perfect analogy or metaphor for us moms is like, yes, we need to be grounded and we need to have these routines and these systems and all of these things that will serve us well, but if we hold them so rigidly, that will not serve us either. If they cause us additional stress or pressure, that will not serve us either. Michelle: If we need... So many of my clients are like, I wanna heal perfectly. And I'm like, that's your patterning. We're gonna break that. You cannot heal perfectly. To the whole palm tree thing, it's like, we have to be grounded and rooted and have these things with intention and get really comfortable swaying in the wind and being flexible without breaking and pivoting and all of that stuff. So yes, the planning. Yes the intention. I think it's so powerful. I think a lot of us are decent with that. I think where a lot of us are, at least in my experience, where I tend to see more of a struggle is when things don't go according to our intention or when we have a plan and it doesn't go according to our plan. I think that's a lot of the deeper work. Mikki: Absolutely. I guess sort of going off of that, if there was one thing that you wish you could download into people so that they just knew it, right? What do you do when things don't go according to plan? Because it happens in little tiny ways and then giant ways. Right? Like you said, getting the kids out the door or getting their shoes on, to marriages falling apart. There's the spectrum, but what do you think if you could download into the moms, you wish they knew to be able to handle that with that flexibility that you're talking about and resilience? Michelle: Yeah, I think I remind myself often that I have a very skewed perspective of how important things actually are. Mikki: Oh, tell me more. Michelle: We all just do by nature because we're living in it in this moment, I have very little perspective right now about how much impact this decision or this whatever is gonna have in 10 years, it's probably gonna have none. And these things that we blow out of proportion, even the things like what school our kids go to or how long they're breastfed, if we have babies, or all of these things that we allow to stress us out so much that actually have such little impact in the big picture. So just constantly reminding myself like, Michelle, you're seeing, you're not... You're very skewed in how much importance you're placing on this right now. And that takes a lot of the pressure off because that's probably true. Mikki: That was mind-blown on that one. Great, so it's such a good reminder. We don't have perspective, we don't. We can't see ten steps ahead, that's never our job. Never our ability. Michelle: And when we look back, I think it confirms that because I think of so many things that I stressed over when my kids were newborns and then toddlers, and I probably can't even make a list of the things I stressed over because I've already forgotten them and they didn't make much of a difference, but I know I did. Mikki: Yeah, I think it's so important and just to really... That's why I love this work that you're doing. And give yourself the tools and the time and the resources and the energy to be able to keep yourself grounded and rooted, like you talked about, and really deal with what is present in this moment. I always ask clients like, what time zone are you in? Are you in the past or the future? Because you cannot affect anything in those, but you have complete power in your present moment. And so I love that question. Sort of reminding yourself that you have a skewed perspective and come back to what you can do, which is look at what's available right now, what's going on right now, and what do I need? Michelle: Yeah, I love that. And I think within that too, this is something else that's coming up for me around this, is that what can I control? And so often, I think there's so much power and really understanding how to be self-referencing, because I think especially in parenting, we're doing as well as our children are doing, or we're doing as well as our job is doing, or we're doing as well as all of these different factors. We're doing as well as the bank account is, or as well as whatever it is that we're measuring against in order to be well. And I think that when we can get to the point where we understand that all of that is created within us and we have control over determining how we feel at any given moment, regardless of the peanut gallery and the inner critic, and all of these different things, that is powerful. Mikki: I love that. That's such a good note. I think what just came up for me when you were saying that is that... Because one thing with divorce is you are just so terrified that you've hurt your children with this act that maybe it is the right decision for you, but there's a lot of fear around what it'll do for them. And I think all of these things I just feel like are so nourishing, just your words to remind us that there are things that we can do to take care of and effect ourselves in a positive way, which then that's what makes our kids okay, right? Kids are gonna be okay if... They don't need you to make them okay, they just need to watch you be okay and you take care of you. And so I love this conversation. Michelle: And our kids are... Our kids can handle really difficult things and they can handle really painful things. They don't do a good job at handling it on their own, and I think that's such a good reminder, is that if we can be present in helping them process these things and allow space for them to have the normal range of emotions that would be expected for what our kids are going through, that's all they need. They'll be okay. Mikki: I could talk to you all day, but I have to be respectful of time. So I will. Thank you for this conversation so much. I do have one more I ask everyone who comes on, so I do you wanna ask you. This is Co-parenting with Confidence, so how do you define confidence? Michelle: Confidence I think is complicated. And I think I'm gonna come back to the self-referencing thing, because I think when I had prepared for this and I had put a note, that's what I had, that's what I had put for this question, and I think it's so true. I think when we can get to a place where we reconnect with our intuition, 'cause I think that's another thing that a lot of us are so out of touch with, and we're looking to all the experts or the in-laws or our parents or all these things but it's like, man, you got this own connection for how you're gonna parent your kids and how you're gonna do things. That's really powerful. Michelle: So if we can connect to that intuition and really operate from a place of self-referencing, if it feels aligned for me, if it feels right for me, if it's a full body yes for me, then I can get to a place where I'm operating in confidence, which to me is alignment. And I think I heard something the other day about making a distinction between feeling beautiful and feeling radiant. And when I think about confidence, I think about radiance to just be standing and walking in a way that just feels very open, that feels... I think confidence can feel vulnerable, I think confidence can feel scary, I think confidence can feel a lot of these things that we might not necessarily attribute to feeling confident, but for me, it's feeling like I don't have to hide and I can be fully, fully radiant and myself. Mikki: I love that, man. Thank you so much. That's beautiful. So tell us where can people find you, how can they get more of you? 'Cause I know they're gonna want all the things. Michelle: Yeah, so you can find me on the podcast The Calm Mom. That's probably the best place. There's so many resources there for women who are experiencing anxiety or overwhelm or burn out, tons of free resources there. In the show notes to most of those episodes, there's the list of regulation resources that I talked about if you're looking to grow in ways to help regulate your nervous system. Also I have a website, michellegrosser.com, there is a quiz there that is personality pattern quiz, but I have gotten more feedback about that quiz than anything else. So if you are curious how your own childhood experiences might be impacting your parenting and your motherhood experience, that's a great resource, michellegrosser.com/quiz. And then I'm on Instagram @michellegrosser.coach. Not particularly spending a lot of time there, but I am there sometimes, but the podcast is definitely the best place to hear and connect with me. Mikki: Perfect. I'll have all that in the show notes for them so they can get in contact. Thank you so much for your time and for coming, and your expertise, and with them, I am so grateful. Michelle: Oh, it's my pleasure. This was so great. Thank you for having me. Mikki: Oh, and one more thing, the legal stuff, this podcast is solely intended for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be a substitute for any medical advice. Please consult your physician or a qualified medical professional for personalized medical advice. Thanks for listening to Co-parenting with Confidence. If you want more information or resources from this podcast, visit coparentingwithconfidence.com. I'll see you next week. [music]