Ep #23: Choosing Your Own Happiness

I'm Mikki Gardner, and this is the Co-parenting with Confidence Podcast, episode number 23, Choosing Your Own Happiness. 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 is 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. Welcome friends. I'm so excited that you're back here with me for another episode. In the last episode, we talked all about raising whole, not just happy kids, and this is one of those pillars that is so integral to the work that I do as a life coach and as a conscious co-parenting coach, so I wanted to dive into it a little bit further, and this time from the perspective of you, of you choosing your wholeness and your happiness. This week, I'll be sharing with you some of the common patterns that I see in my clients, the moms that I talk to each and every day, and even in my own life, you might recognize some of these in your own life. They might be those patterns that keep you unhappy, that keep you stuck, that keep you frustrated and just not showing up as the mom that you truly wanna be. So the first pattern that I wanna talk about is the pattern of routine, and this one might seem a little bit odd, but do you remember that movie in the '80s, Groundhog's Day? So often we can end up in our life waking up every single day in a pattern, doing the same thing over and over and over again and wondering why our life doesn't look different. Think about what happens when your alarm goes off in the morning, do you go through the same exact motions in the same exact order? Are you having all of the same thoughts and feelings, maybe feelings of dread of not wanting to do this? Now, this can go one of two ways, routine. Routine can be extremely helpful and a great part of a really healthy aligned life. It can also have another side, and that's what that Groundhog's Day movie was illustrating. So to understand which direction it's going for us, well, first and foremost, you know by the way that you feel. Our natural state is to feel good, our natural state, when we feel most at ease, at peace, content with life is when we're kind of going with the flow, when we're aligned, when we don't necessarily have to have control, but we're just going with life. When we're in that state of ease, we're actually at a very calm, peaceful, relaxed place. Now, there's another side of it. When we are creating routine, because we're looking for a sense of control, we're looking to create control or certainty so that we can feel safe maybe in an unsafe world or in an unsafe environment, oftentimes when we feel like our life is out of control, when we don't know what to do next, when we don't have that feeling of safety for ourselves, we can start to try to create routine and control as a way to create this certainty for ourselves, but it's a false sense of security that we're actually creating. So mostly, you know if routine is working for you by how it feels. If it feels like we have a tight grip while we're having to control everything and keep everything just so in an order so that we feel okay, this is not a good sense of routine and control. The other side of routine though, is a very healthy balance and a sense of alignment, a sense of or a set of actions that we do over and over that create peace, calm and ease. So what might that look like? That might be self-care routines, that might be a morning routine, that might be getting up and setting your day, starting it with meditation or prayer, an intention of starting your day on purpose in the direction that you wanna go. Now, this kind of pattern can be very, very healthy, but the other kind of pattern that I see so many of my clients stuck in is just day after day, doing the same things over and over, feeling miserable, not knowing what to do, not trying anything else, and it just creates more and more helplessness, it creates more and more negativity and it creates more stuckness. So I don't know if you relate to this at all, I know that for me in my own life, I have a very specific routine that I start my day with each day, I tend to end my day in a very similar way. This for me actually creates a sense of self-trust and a sense of security from the standpoint that I'm going to show up for myself, and that creates more strength and more confidence. Other healthy routines might look like setting a good morning routine for our children getting out the door, that might look like at the end of each day, we get everything organized for what has to happen, if it's a school day, are all the bags packed, is everything ready to go, so that our morning is more at ease, is more peaceful, is less chaotic. These kinds of routines are super helpful because they're, again, going towards that sense of calm and peace, we are intentionally creating routines that create more ease, more groundedness and more peace in our life, and this is a huge benefit, or are we stuck in a pattern where we're not doing any of those things, maybe, maybe where we're creating more and more chaos by not being intentional or by expecting other people to do things or whatever it might be, but when we start to look at what routine am I playing, am I playing one that's setting me up for a positive experience, one that's setting myself up for more ease and peace, or am I stuck in a pattern that I'm doing over and over and over that isn't getting me the results that I'm looking for? And these are the patterns that we have to start to look for, and these kinds of routines, what we're stuck in and we decide, are they in our best interest or are they serving our highest good by how they make us feel? We have to do something differently first, and by doing that, we actually shift into the alignment of having a new reality. So what do I mean by that? We actually have to start to do things differently if we wanna feel differently, and so that might be creating these routines that are more intentional, more on purpose, to create more ease, to create more positivity, to create more happiness in our life. Another pattern that I see so often is that we actually think that other people need to change for us to feel differently, for us to feel better, for us to be happy. We think that they are the ones that are causing the way that we feel, and so they are the ones that need to change, but we have to first realize that it isn't the external thing, it's not the other person that needs to change, because what's really happening is when something happens, we have a thought about that, when we have that thought, it generates a feeling inside of us, and that feeling inside of us will dictate what we do or don't do in the world, and that is what is causing our suffering or our joy. And so we have to first start to understand that other people aren't necessarily causing our pain. Now, I'm not saying that other people's bad behavior or hurtful actions aren't harmful, but what I'm saying is that it's not those things that are specifically creating our pain, our pain comes from our thought about it, our pain comes from the core beliefs that we hold and then all of the thoughts that we think about it, and this is a really important distinction. Why? Because when we understand and it's not necessarily the other person or the action or the circumstance in our life or the tragic thing that's happening, we can understand that we have a little bit more control over it. Now, I'm not saying you don't wanna still feel really awful about horrible things that happen. Absolutely. But what I wanna do is start to help you understand that when we are so attached to changing the other person so that we can feel better, we miss the point, and the point is is that we can feel differently today based on how we want to think and feel about it. But in order for us to do that, we have to be able to separate from it, and this is the pattern that I see so many times with parents or with co-parents or exes, is that they can't separate from the action of the other person, the feelings that are caused from the other person's actions or when our child is in pain, we... Sometimes as moms, we get so attached to that feeling that we become really one with it, we're fused with it. When were fused with it all we can feel as more of it. Do you see? And so what we need to start to do is detach from it and understand that really we have more control than we believe we do when we're willing to separate from it, when we're willing to see it outside of ourselves, because when we are then able to detach even the littlest bit from the other person's large emotions or the other person's actions, well, then we have the ability to think a little bit more clearly, and we can start to understand that we can make a shift in the pattern to do something different, to make a change in the entire dynamic. So what do I mean by that? Well, I'm gonna use two examples here, one with co-parents and one with kids, so let's start with the kids. Let's say that we have a kid that lies a lot and maybe we get very fixated on why they're lying and they're always lying and we can never trust them and all of the things, right? Now, there's a number of things going on behind the scenes. I know last week we talked about sort of the behavior or the emotion being just the tip of the iceberg as to what's going on, but what I wanna focus on here is what our participation in it. Now we can get locked in the pattern of thinking, my kid is a liar, I can never trust them, they're constantly telling lies and then when they do tell a lie, what do you do when you think that? You freak out, right? You focus on the lie, you yell and scream, "I told you I never can you trust you, see, we've done it again." And you get locked in that pattern of the lying and the disconnection and there being no resolution. Or if we're able to separate from it, able to separate just the tiniest bit from the behavior and the child's behavior and look at it differently, well, then we have some opportunity here. Right? Maybe, let's just say the kid broke a lamp. Now, in the last example, we could yell and scream at them for breaking the lamp and lying about it and all the things, or we could say, "I'm gonna do something new here, I'm gonna actually create a different pattern, instead of going all the way down that loop of where I get, I'm yelling and I'm blaming and I'm doing all the things, maybe when the kid... When the lamp is broken, you ask, "What happened to the lamp?" Maybe you think he made a mistake and you open up to, it could have just been a mistake. And so you go to him and you say, "Hey, what happened?" And he might say, "I didn't do it." And you could say, "You're the only one in the room and the lamp is broken, can you help me understand what happened here?" Or we need to figure out what happened to the lamp, because it's broken. And as soon as you see a little bit of an opening there, maybe he says, "Well, I did break the lamp and I didn't mean to." Instead of yelling, going back into that last pattern, maybe we can realize he made a mistake, you know it's okay, but he actually did just tell me the truth. And we could say something like, "Thank you for telling me the truth. You're very brave to have told me the truth," right? Because what this does is it offers up something different, it offers the child a little bit of safety and that he didn't just get completely yelled at and that he did fess up, which might create a different loop next time, it increases self-worth for both of you. But can you see how when we're aware of, I know where I go when I think that my kid is always lying to me and I stay in that perpetual pattern, you stay yelling, you stay blaming and you stay disconnected versus am I willing to see this differently? And kind of stepping out into a different option, even in the tiniest bit, I'm gonna look at this pattern from another way when we need the other person to change for us to feel better. So one that I get a lot is when one co-parent is constantly barraging the other one with text messages, whether... I know I've used the word nastygrams or if it's Textmageddon or whatever it is, but those text messages that come in and in and in and even... I was just on the phone recently with a client that said, "Well, I told them I will not engage with text like that." And then every time he texts, she'd say, "I'm telling you again, I won't engage." Right? Yet, she was engaging. And then out of frustration, two or three times in, she's frustrated, she's texting nastygrams back because she's so frustrated that he's not listening, but really she doesn't need him to stop texting for her to feel differently, she just needs to stop texting back to realize that her power really lies in her ability to hold the line for herself, to say, I said I wasn't texting, I'm not texting. She doesn't even need to tell him she's not texting, she just simply doesn't engage. When she can do this from that place, she's more empowered, right? So sometimes when we know we're in a pattern, when we can see it and we don't know how to get out, we have to simply be willing to detach from it a little bit, to do something differently. So that's a pattern that I see a lot of, is needing the other person to change so that you can feel better. The last pattern that I see a lot that I wanted to point out today is the pattern of repeating the past. Way too often, we live in a perpetual pattern of repeating the story of our past, we get so fixated on what's missing, what's lacking, blaming others for our pain, blaming others for the life that we're living, complaining about the life that we're living. We are literally calling in more of it when we're doing this. When we are rehearsing the past, we are literally creating a lens and a mirror for what we see in the world. When we describe ourselves based on what has happened in the past, we declare ourselves in relation to that and what we've survived, but we don't realize that what we're doing is fusing with an identity that's based on those past events and this keeps us deeply stuck and creating a reality from that same space of the past. Listen, the fact of the matter is is that if there is something in our life that we don't prefer or that we don't want, it's not that necessarily anything has gone wrong, it simply means that you're holding a belief that you're allowing it to be there. So instead of looking at the past as an identity, as a way to define ourselves, what we want to do is honor our beautiful strength and the courage for the path that we've walked but begin to tell a new story, one that is focused on our gifts, focused on the positive, without constantly referencing back to maybe what we've been through. We have to be really willing to create a new reality. If we want to create a new reality, we have to change who we are being, those beliefs that we hold, by stopping rehearsing the old thoughts that are keeping us stuck and start rehearsing new thoughts consistent with where we wanna go. For us to be willing to step out of the pattern of the past, we have to be relentless in our commitment to becoming a different version of ourself, a new version. If we want anything to change, it has to begin with not rehearsing what we don't want over and over and again, and this is where that feeling of Groundhog's Day can come up, when we're living in the past over and over and just creating more of it. You know, it makes no sense to expect that our world will somehow change drastically when we show up the same exact way every day. When we believe that we are who we were in the past, we can't expect to be a different person today. We literally have to show up differently first, and by doing that, we shift into the alignment of who we wanna be. So how do we start to do this? You know that I always wanna give you tangible ways of how to do things, and how we become a different version of ourselves, well, there's five things I wanna talk about quickly. One is just becoming aware. Just like I mentioned before, becoming aware of the patterns that you're in, maybe it's wanting other people to change, maybe you're in a pattern of negativity or a pattern of looking at the past, maybe you're in a pattern of complaining or blaming, maybe you're just in a really unhealthy routine of maybe disorganization and chaos that isn't allowing you to step up differently. So the first step is awareness. When we become aware of a thought or a feeling that we don't like or that we don't want necessarily, we first start by just noticing it, recognizing it, acknowledging it, stating it, seeing that it is there, without pushing it away, without resistant or judgment. We just notice it. Once we've noticed it and we've seen it and we've acknowledged it and we've allowed it to be there, well, then we want to separate from it, right. This is where we wanna detach. When I was talking about the behavior of other people, realizing that we want to detach from it, so often we say, we keep ourselves fused with it, whether it's a feeling or a thought. If it's a feeling we might think, you know, we might not like anxiety, so we might say, "I'm anxious, I'm angry, I'm this." When we say those words, "I am blank," we are attaching to it, so we wanna separate from it. How do we do this with our feelings? We might say, "I notice anxiety. I notice sadness." This might sound ridiculous, but for the brain, it's a really huge distinction because it separates from it, so we're not so fused in with it. You can say, "I'm experiencing anxiety." If it's a thought that you're having over and over, maybe it's the thought, my ex hates me, he's always looking for a fight, or my kid is a mess, or maybe you've started dating and you think that there's just no good men, there's no good men left. So to start separating from those thoughts, it might sound like, "I'm having the thought that my ex hates me, I'm having the thought he's always looking for a fight," that little distinction offers your brain the opportunity to think something else. You might not do it right away, but it at least opens the door. Or it might be, "I'm having the thought that my kid is a mess right now," adding thoughts like right now, in this moment, or I'm having the thought, I'll help with that. The third step is making a decision, the decision to let go. So you've become aware of the thought, you've separated from it and now we're gonna let it go, we're gonna send it down the river. Imagine in that moment, once you've separated a little bit from the thought, you're gonna then take that thought and put it on a little leaf and let it float down the river or maybe it's like a cloud that's passing by, and you just allow it to pass by. It sounds simple and it sounds ridiculous, I can understand, but it's really important because when we're not attached to the thought or feeling and we're separate from it and we allow it to pass by, this is a powerful place to be, because then we can move to the fourth step, which is we just choose a different thought, a thought that feels better, even only the littlest of bits. And so what do we wanna do then? It's just being willing to look at it differently. Am I willing to see this differently? And so that thought, my ex is always looking for a fight, how could we feel even just incrementally better or have a thought that serves us a little bit more. Maybe it sounds like, "It sucks, we don't get along that well right now," that's not too far off. I'm not asking you to think, "We're the best of friends. Oh, we can co-parent like rockstars." No, it's maybe just moving a little bit away from, he's always looking for a fight to, it just sucks we don't get along right now or my kid is a mess at the moment, or maybe if you're dating and you're having that thought that there's no good men left and we can separate and see and having that thought, maybe then we can decide, the more I date, the more I'll find what I want, just these little tweaks of reframing or even reframing the feeling, what does that look like? When we want to choose differently and feel even the littlest bit better, that's when we can start to add in the words like, I notice I'm feeling anxious right now or I'm experiencing anxiety today. Oftentimes, for those of us who have woken up, who have experienced anxiety or depression in our life, it's a feeling that you don't wanna feel. For me, I know that sort of black cloud of depression when it's coming. My first gut reaction is to resist it, to run away, to not wanna get stuck in it, but I've learned that it actually is required of me to feel it, to see it, to acknowledge it and then to say, "I'm feeling that black cloud today or this morning," and just that helps me reframe it a little bit to feel just a little bit better, to know that it's not all... It's not gonna be like this forever. It's not gonna last forever and ever and ever, it's just right now. And this brings us to the fifth and final step, which is commit, right? So we've become aware. We've tried to separate from the thought or the feeling, we've decided intentionally to let it go and then we've also decided to choose a different thought or feeling, to try to reframe it just a little bit more, even if it's one degree towards the positive, towards feeling just a little bit more, empowered a little bit better or even just not as bad, and then we commit. We commit to feeling better, we commit to feeling good because it is our desired state, it is our birthright. Often when we're stuck in these patterns, we feel really attached to them, and this usually happens when our life experience gives us a lot of evidence that makes them feel so true. It's really just that we thought them over and over and over, so it's our job to really diffuse the energy around them by taking these steps to just not be so attached to them, because really, like I just said, the single most important focus of our day should be feeling good, because we were meant to feel good. We don't want to go down that rabbit hole revisiting the past all of the time and staying stuck in those patterns that aren't serving us. You don't need to and it's just not gonna serve you. Really, every single emotion you feel reflects the alignment or the misalignment with your own well-being, with where you're supposed to be. When we're aligned with lack, we feel stressed, we feel anxiety, worry, panic, embarrassment, all of those things. When we are aligned with our own well-being in our true state of abundance, we feel ease, confidence, appreciation, lightness, security, calm, we feel free. So we really wanna start to pay very close attention to this feeling, what are the feelings that we're feeling most? And then start to work on becoming more aware of the ones that are not serving us. You know right now in the world, there's a lot happening. When I'm recording this, it's early March and what is going on in Ukraine is terrifying for so many of us, it's hard to even wrap our heads around, and we can feel very helpless as if we can't do anything, but we, each one of us can do something. The biggest single shift that any of us can make is to step into alignment with our own truth, to actually feel better, because when we feel good, we are serving our function, we are one with the oneness of the world, we are one with our truth, we are who we are here to be with his one with the source in the universe, God, whomever you wanna call it. When we are loving, we are creating good in the world, and maybe some days we aren't creating good, but maybe we're just creating less of a mess and that's even better than nothing. So we have to choose something different if we wanna feel different for our kids to be okay. For us to be better communicators, for us to be better co-parents, we have to make a choice to do things differently. We have to start releasing the patterns that are holding you back, and we do this by actually walking through the process I just laid out. Listen, I know that depending on where you are in your life that things can feel hopeless, you might feel completely helpless where you are. You might not see any way that things can change, but I promise you they can. You know, Martha Beck talks about just changing one degree, it's like, look at your day and everything that's on your to-do list and go through it and allow yourself to notice how you're feeling about it. You know, if you have clean the kitchen, it might be, "Oh, here I go," but if it's walk the dog, you might feel a little bit lighter and, "Oh, you know, I really wanna do that." Maybe it's call Bob and tell him about that thing and you're like, "Oh, right" or go see your kid play basketball at his game, and you're like, "Yes." So you just notice how do you feel about each one of them, and then you just add more of the activities in that make you feel lighter, that make you feel brighter, that's a one-degree shift. When we're doing just one degree each day, even if it's one degree of changing the pattern that you're in, maybe you start out with the best of intention of not yelling at your kid, but 10 minutes in there you are yelling, it's just noticing, it's being willing to stop yourself, maybe as you're yelling right before, right after, whatever it is, and look at it and ask yourself some questions about it, and how could I do this differently? How could I show up differently? How could I step into the version of me that I truly wanna be, and it's all in releasing ourselves from these patterns that are holding us back. So that's our show for today, and I hope that this episode is has offered you just some ideas on how to release yourself from those patterns or those things that you're ready to give yourself permission to let go of and break free from. If you have any questions or you need any help applying this in your own life, I want you to go to the show notes and I put a link in there so that you can sign up for a clarity call with me. This is a free, no strings attached call, where I'm gonna help you identify one of these patterns that you are stuck in that you are ready to release and we will give you the clarity on how to do that in your life today. Feeling good is your birthright, so let's get you feeling better today. And one last thing before we say goodbye, if you're receiving value from this free podcast, I would be so grateful if you would rate and review the show. This helps me more than you could know, it helps me deliver more of what you love and what you wanna hear, but when you rate, review, it helps more women find the show so that we can create more peace and more alignment in this world for us and our kiddos. And that's what we're here to do. Thank you so much for spending this time with me. I'm so grateful you're here with me. I'll see you next week, and in the meantime, take really good care of you. [music] 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]