Ep #133: Creating a Harmonious Home (Even After Divorce)

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.

Hi there, I'm Mikki Gardner. I'm a life and parenting coach, and I specialize in co-parenting. And I'm a mom to a 14-year-old son. My family is now made up of my ex, his wife, they now have a child together, and I've had a blended family for the last four years, we all have a very collaborative and cooperative co-parenting relationship now, but it wasn't always that way. Like so many, my marriage ended after betrayal and many, many unsuccessful attempts to repair the rupture that was made, I finally decided that divorce was for me and my family the best option, we felt for the sake of our child. So I set out on my goal to be the best divorced mom, that there ever was. I was gonna co-parent like a rockstar, I wasn't gonna let this affect my son or negatively impact me any more than it already had. I laugh now, but I was determined to live my best life right out of the gate. The problem came in is that I was living with a lot of anger and a lot of shame about what had happened in my marriage, in my family, and what I now know looking back is that I tried so hard to control everyone else, but they just wouldn't comply, right?

Those dang humans with free will, and I would just leave more and more angry and resentful from each interaction. I vehemently resisted the fact that I had no control over what happened in the other house, I would try to manipulate and coerce the other people, AKA people pleasing, not realizing that it was just a way for me to avoid what I was really feeling. And if you looked at me on the outside, I looked really successful, but if you looked close up, which I very rarely let people do, you could see the cracks, but mostly I was just drowning, I was exhausted, I was angry and I was done. It was through that journey of really breaking open that I started to understand that I had to find a different way, a journey of healing my mind, my body and my spirit, where I learned how to live in alignment with what I truly desire. I did this because I started to learn how to understand and manage my emotions, to manage my own energy, so that I could be a positive influence of change for my family. These are the tools and the skills that I now teach to my clients, but that I employ in my own life that allow me, to live a life that I love and love the life that I'm living.

It's totally possible, even as stepmoms, even as co-parents, even as divorced moms, even as single moms, I believe wholeheartedly that every parent, every co-parent, every step-parent has the same capability to create a harmonious home for themselves and their children. Also often with divorce and then moving into blended families, the concentration is all about separation, taking sides, defining ownership, creating fences so that we can contain each person in their roles and responsibilities, but when we are co-parenting from this place that only perpetuates isolation, it fuels the ongoing conflict and creates more problems when it's not followed. It is so disempowering, and it leaves us feeling powerless and hopeless, so instead the conversation that I really believe is necessary is the one that is structured around healthy empowered co-parenting, which is all about how to live in alignment with you and your children's well-being. When you are focused on this and showing up in support of well-being, you naturally build a home and an environment for you and your kids to thrive in.

Even after divorce, even when things change, even when other people change, and that's what I wanna talk with you about today is creating a harmonious home and no, you don't have to get all the humans, we can use the ones you have. But I wanna help you create an action of a plan that is in support and will improve your internal peace and your overall wellness immediately. So this conversation is gonna be useful for you, no matter the stressors, no matter the problems currently happening, what I want you to think about are those times when you find yourself triggered or when you are trying to suppress or avoid the negative feelings that really weigh you down. Here's a couple of examples, maybe every week you try so hard and promise yourself, I'm gonna stay calm during the transition, even though the kids might freak out, even though they're gonna be missing things, even though the other parent is always late or rushed, even though somebody's having a meltdown. Maybe you promise yourself that you're gonna keep it together, but you end up losing it each time, melting down yourself. Maybe you've even come to completely drug transition days because of the upheaval that it brings to your home, I certainly get that.

Or maybe it's dinner time, maybe you've been really committed to creating a healthy meal with a peaceful experience where everybody is around the table and connecting, but it seems like every night you get there, the kids are fighting, everybody's complaining about what you made and you're just sick and tired of trying when nobody appreciates or is helping you out. You can feel the anger and the resentment building, and maybe you notice that building even in the afternoon when it starts to get close to starting dinner time. Have you ever had that experience? Or maybe you work so incredibly hard to make sure that everything is okay while your kids are at the house, you are the only one taking responsibility, you're the one taking care of every single detail, managing all of the emotions, all of the schedules, all of the moving parts trying so hard not to drop the ball, but every time the kids are gone, you just feel drained, you're left exhausted in depleting. And then you have to spend all of your time trying to get back to normal. Do any of these relate for you? I know in my coaching practice, I hear some version of these stories over and over, but what I'm really hearing behind each of these stories, each of these examples, is that the transition days are just too hard to manage.

What I'm hearing is I take on too much, or when no one is willing to help me make dinner peaceful, no one's willing to be part of this vision, I have. Really, what I'm hearing is I lack clear vision and values for the situation. And when I hear that story about how I have to take care of everything, I'm the only one. What I hear there is I don't have healthy boundaries. There's always something behind the stories, and that's the part that we have to start to understand because like my experience of having the anger and the resentment sort of eating away on the inside, these stories, these things that we're telling ourselves, they eat away at us, unless we become more aware of them. So instead of fighting against what isn't working, instead of focusing on all the things that are wrong or problems, we are going to get clear and start to shift into a more positive, harmonious direction. And we're gonna do that with three simple steps that I'm gonna lay out today, clear vision and values, creating an executable plan that's aligned with you and your family's well-being and consistency and follow through, these are the three steps that we are going to talk about today, so let's begin with clear vision.

It's really about deciding and setting the vision for what you truly want, it's not about reacting to what you don't want, but it's about deciding and giving yourself direction to what you do. So whenever you go on a trip in the car, you would never jump into the car and just start driving without knowing where you're going. No, if we wanna go to, Let's just say the Hamptons. I would put the Hamptons into my GPS and then I would follow along. So that's essentially what we're wanting to do here is decide where we want to go, and there's a few ground rules that I wanna set here because there's a big picture vision, which is so helpful to do for creating a home that is exactly what you want for you and your family, we have to set that big picture vision. But for this conversation today, what I wanna focus on is that one time that you're finding yourself getting triggered, that one area where you're noticing yourself getting activated or reacting in ways that you don't want to, showing up, not as the version of you that you want. So like the examples I gave you of, maybe it's dinner time, maybe it's transition days, maybe it's trying to get out of the house in the mornings on time, and without losing your marbles, we're gonna pick one area, and we wanna set the vision for what we want that to look like.

So here are the rules for doing that, one, we start small, we're gonna pick that one thing, our brain's gonna wanna tell us that we have to focus on all the problems 'cause all the things or all the reasons it's not gonna work, but instead to do this process, we're just going to look at one small thing that we can address right now. So that might be creating more calm on the dinner table, more ease with transition days, getting out of the door on time in the morning, we're just gonna look at one small area. The second rule is, I want you to make it measurable, something that you can notice and measure change. This is really important because we want to celebrate the positives, we wanna celebrate when we are shifting and aligning, so it needs to be measurable. The third rule is allow yourself to not know all the steps, if we could type it into GPS and it gave us all the steps, that'd be great but that's not how the world works. So we're gonna allow ourselves to not know exactly the direction that we're going and trust that the path is going to unfold when we walk through this. The fourth and final rule is, it has to be within your control. In any problem or difficult situation, there are factors that we can control and factors that we can't control, but there's also stuff in between where we can kind of push it in a particular direction, but we don't necessarily have the final say.

This might be other people's behavior, other people's actions, we might be able to influence a little bit here and there, but ultimately we don't have the final say. Our own anxiety comes up when we are focusing disproportionately on all the things we can't control, and when we're focused over there, we're neglecting to think about what we can, and so that is where we wanna focus. And the sad part is, or the unfortunate part is, is that when we do get focused more and more on those problems and what isn't working, it becomes a feedback loop, it perpetuates itself keeping us focused on those things and making it harder to look at the others. So that's why we wanna come back into this and focus on this one thing, pick one thing that we wanna focus on, one issue, and start to shift what we can control our words, our behavior, our mindset, so do you have your one thing? Okay, good. Now it's time to decide who you want to be when that issue comes up. So if it is dinner time, I want you to think about how do I wanna be? Who do I wanna be at that dinner table? Is it grounded? Is it peaceful? Is it calm? Is it nurturing, understanding? You get to decide who you wanna be and how you wanna feel. If you were the version of you, the highest version, and you were able to sort of handle anything that came your way in that situation, how would you be feeling?

And I want you to write that down. So now that we have that first step done, we're gonna move to step two, which is creating the intentional and actionable plan that is aligned with you and your well-being, and then we're gonna reverse engineer that path to get there, we're gonna decide what are the actions, what are the feelings and the beliefs that you need to be having to align you in the direction you wanna go? So let's take the transition day example, you know the kids get anxious with the coming and the going, maybe tempers are short, maybe one kid really struggles more than the other, maybe everyone's running around trying to get ready, you decide that you wanna be the calm, grounded force for them, so that means you need to be clear, you need to be organized, you need to be calm. So you need to decide in advance, who do I need to be? What do I need to be able to be that way? If you need to be more organized, what would that look like? Would that mean the night before that everything gets packed up and put it aside? Does that mean if 4 O'clock is transition time, maybe we actually need to think more like 3:30 so that we create a little bit more space? Do you need more time for yourself, right? Maybe it happens in the morning and you find yourself constantly rushed.

So maybe you need a little bit more space in the morning to get a slow start, maybe rest is really important. This is one that we overlook so much of the time, maybe you stay up late trying to get everything done, and then you kind of have a short temper in the morning, right? So maybe we need a little extra rest on those night. Maybe it would look like not having any meetings or appointments in the morning or the late afternoon, surrounding transition time, just so that you have more spaciousness, it's really asking yourself, how am I going to create the environment for me to be able to be the version of me that I want? What do I need in advance? And what do I need after? And starting to think through this and being proactive about it, instead of letting yourself get right up to that moment, we're gonna proactively think about what it is that you need to be able to show up as your best self. We also need to be realistic and plan for the obstacles and the detours and have strategies to navigate those, who or what is going to jeopardize your calm? You likely know. There's usually one thing that happens and we get triggered, right? And maybe we notice it, it happens every time, and you're like, Oh, I got it again.

So you wanna understand what could possibly jeopardize you not being successful in how you wanna show up and plan for that. How do you wanna support yourself when this thing happens? What do you need to be able to do that? Asking yourself these questions, it might look like needing to have a boundary in place, it might look like needing a back-up plan, you get to decide and set yourself up with the plan to navigate the unavoidable, but often the normal obstacles, so often we are surprised by being triggered with the thing that triggers us every time, so we need to be un-surprised when these things happen. So as you're thinking through this, I want you to close your eyes and envision in your mind's eye how it would look if it were going really well, this period of time that you're thinking about this problem that you're thinking about, how you're gonna navigate. How would you be feeling when you're successfully navigating it, how would you handle those obstacles and the hiccups, see yourself doing that, feeling the way that you wanna feel, whether that's calm, energized, empowered. And then now I want you to write down the one to three things that you need to implement in order to be this version of you, what are the priorities that you are going to set up for success?

What are the priorities that you're gonna set in place to know that you have everything you need to be able to successfully navigate this plan? Now that you have the plan, we are going to implement with consistency and follow through, this really comes down to being able to manage and regulate your emotions. What does that mean? It's learning how to get out of that reactivity and into full responsibility. I define responsibility as the ability to respond, response-ability, and it is important because so much of the time we are simply reacting to what is happening around us, reacting to the situation, reacting to the other people, and we aren't aligned with what and who we wanna be, we're not moving in the direction we want we're just reacting to whatever happens. And so responsibility really looks like learning how to regulate your emotions and nervous system to be able to stay grounded. I teach my clients a lot of somatic modalities to take back the control, to create the safety within their own body, so that they can show up and take responsibility. It's learning how to make decisions from a non-emotional neutral place again, so we can consistently stay aligned with who we wanna be and how we wanna show up, we have to shift into that responsibility so that we are actively shaping our world in a way that is aligned with our values and our vision.

And to do this, we have to have the skills to regulate our nervous system and emotions, to have the willingness to stay in the struggle, that kind of messy part when we're learning and growing, we have to be willing to stay there long enough so that we can have the breakthrough. So often we give up, it gets challenging, it gets hard, somebody pushes back and we're like, Oh, that didn't work. No, we've gotta learn how to stay in the struggle long enough for the breakthrough to happen, and the first step of this is realizing when you are triggered, when you are having big emotions, when you are in a reactive place, as soon as you realize that, that has happened, I want you to just stop, hit the pause button and take three deep breaths in through your nose, out through your mouth, and then two more times. And out through your mouth. If you just did that with me, I will guarantee that you feel calmer, and when we can calm our emotions and our nervous system, it allows us to get our thinking brain, our rational mind, the part of our brain that has all of the logics in it that can help us make decisions, delay gratification and move forward, that's our prefrontal cortex, and that's where we wanna be moving from, but we can't when we're triggered or activated.

So, we have to regulate our emotions, and it starts by just recognizing we've been triggered or we're having a big emotion, and then finding a more grounded space so that you can decide how you want to re-align so that you can show up and move in that direction. Listen, getting triggered isn't wrong, it happens to all of us, we all get activated, we all make mistakes, that's just being human. And we don't know when things are gonna work or not work, we have to be willing to try, but these things happen. And the important thing is what you do next, how you learn from it and how you still show up in alignment with what you desire, this is the consistency and the follow-through. Change doesn't happen overnight, but I promise you, when you take small steps in the direction you wanna go it is amazing how quickly you can turn around and look at how far you've come. It's the snowball effect. It's like when you start moving in the direction, you gain momentum and more and more and more. And this might sound like a lot of work, right? You might be saying, Mikki, it just sounds like too much to think about all of these things, but this is part of living the life that you wanna live, this is part of creating the harmonious home that you want for you and your children and your partners and all of you.

And you might wonder, Why do I have to do it? Wouldn't it be great if someone else would do it? Well, here's the thing, when we don't live intentionally and aligned with how we want to live, we are simply reacting to the environment and to the people around us, and we're essentially giving them control of our experience and ultimately our peace. This is what I want to never go back to in my own life, I wanna avoid it at all costs, and I don't want this for you one more day either, when we are just reacting, we tend to take the easy route, make those easy decisions, right? Just go along with the flow. Just give into the pressure, say yes when we mean no, but those easy decisions actually make our life harder in the long run. So instead we wanna start to think about these three steps, deciding where we wanna go, creating that vision, creating the plan proactively to get us there, and then consistently follow through with it, because when we are willing to do that, it helps us stay in alignment with what we truly want, and it makes our life easier and far more pleasurable and joyful in the long run, so it really begins with clearing out the vision, creating that plan and that consistency and follow through. When we are on the path of creating a more intentional, a more purposeful home for yourself and everyone living in it, you just feel better.

And as moms, we are the matriarch of the house, we set the tone, we are the strongest energy, and when we are willing to step up into that position of influence and empowerment and loving strength, this is when things shift for everybody, but we have to be willing to do it, we have to be willing to put a stake in the ground to decide I actually wanna feel better, I wanna feel stronger and more loving, and I am willing to put in the reps and do the work to get there, it's your choice, you get to decide what feels better, but I promise you, when you get sick and tired of feeling exhausted and overwhelmed and rundown and resentful and powerless, and you're ready to make that commitment to choose to feel better, to create more harmony, you will not be disappointed. I wanna stop a minute to also expand on the word harmony, because I use it intentionally, the definition and psychology of harmony is a positive state of inner peace, calmness and balance, as well as a feeling of being tuned into the world. Notice, this doesn't mean that everything has to be perfect or balanced or easy, but it's a state of being where you are tuned in and flowing with life, you're moving with it. And this is the magic, because the outside world can be chaotic, but when you are internally in harmony, you have peace.

By creating internal harmony, you naturally create more harmony on the outside for you and your kiddos. With every step we've talked about today, it can feel maybe impossible with what's going on in your home today or intimidating, and so I've actually created a program that's gonna help you with it, it's a seven-day program to create a more harmonious home called, Welcome Home. Welcome Home is a free journey, it's gonna arrive in your inbox and it's gonna give you the steps and the encouragement to start to put this plan into action in a way that is supportive of what you desire and how you wanna create it. Each day you're gonna get an email from me and it's gonna focus on one action item, we've talked about three of these steps, but there's actually many more, so you're gonna get one action per day. It's gonna take you no more than 15 minutes, and each one is gonna be there to help you feel more aligned, more supported and more empowered, so that's essentially 15 minutes to feeling really good so that you can be the soft, loving, safe space for your children, and so that you can be that same thing for you. When we wanna be the soft, loving, safe space for our children, we have to be that for ourselves, and this journey is designed to help you start that process today.

And I'm gonna be there each step of the way with you, use the link that's provided to get started, I believe whole-heartedly that you are completely capable to transform your home into a more harmonious one, no matter the chaos that is happening today. I promise you, you are far more powerful than you know, and I'm here to help you step into that powerful, loving, strong energy so that you and your kiddos and your partner and every living being in your home can live with more peace, more ease and more joy. That's what I want for you, and I know it's possible. I can't wait to see you soon. Thank you for spending time with me today.

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 co-parentingwithconfidence.com. I'll see you next week.