Ep #101: Do Yourself a Favor

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. Do you ever feel like you have absolutely no time to yourself? You don't even have time to think or feel, or do anything for yourself? And it's back to school time. Do you feel like, oh, you just want the break of the kids going back to school, but at the same time, you don't want the stress? Well, if you are like, yeah, Mikki, then I want you to stay tuned because today we are gonna talk about how you can do yourself a favor. But before we do that, this is the 101st episode. I cannot believe it. And for the month of September 2023, if you're listening to this live, I have a special gift for you. For each of you that rate and review the show in the month of September, you are going to get a little prize from me. Why? Because when you rate and review the show, it is a gift to me, and it helps me get the show out there to more moms who need to hear this message. It's a gift to them. And so I wanna give a gift to you. It doesn't take more than one minute, I promise. Just go to Apple or wherever you listen to your podcast and rate and review the show. I would appreciate it so much. So today I wanted to talk about doing yourself a favor, and what is that favor? Creating space. Why is this important? Well, so many of us feel like we don't have any time to ourselves, especially after divorce. Now that we're parenting on our own, we have all the responsibility, all the roles to play, all of the things to do with no help. And yeah, maybe you didn't have a lot of help even when you were married, but now for sure it's all on you. And so we feel like we don't have any space to even think or feel or understand what the heck is going on. We're just trying to keep up. And then oftentimes, for those of us that feel that way, then when the kids are gone, we do one of two things. We either busy ourselves because we don't wanna be alone, we don't wanna think about that. The kids aren't with us. And so maybe we busy ourselves with going out or partying or doing whatever, or we shut down, right? We're so consumed with feeling the sadness, feeling the loneliness, that we can't go anywhere. We're just stuck. So we go between these two ends of the spectrum. And so what I wanna talk about today is creating some space and doing yourself a favor so that you can allow change to happen. And as I'm talking about this, I wanted to give you an analogy to think about. It always helps me to visualize what I'm going towards. And so when you think about it, when the caterpillar is ready to become a butterfly, what does it do? Well, it actually finds a quiet place. It spins itself a cocoon, and it waits. It gets really uncomfortable in there. Listen, this is not a pretty process. It basically spins, a silk cocoon turns to mush, and then evolves and grows into this beautiful, beautiful butterfly. But it's also confined, right? It's uncomfortable. It's tight before it allows itself to become what it's meant to be and to fly. And so I want you to think about this, that sometimes in these spaces, when we feel confined, when we feel tight and uncomfortable, it's not that anything has gone wrong, but it is a cue that we are ready to change, we're ready to transform. And that doesn't happen overnight. And oftentimes we need to do ourselves a favor of creating some space to be able to become the next version of ourselves. It's allowing yourself this space to explore, to consider, to get curious, to receive, right? Because that's what we have to be able to do to evolve. It's creating the space to have a life of ease and peace, so that you're not just keeping up, but that you're actually steering yourself in the direction you wanna go. So I'm gonna take this into three steps here, because what does creating space look like? I know sometimes a lot of us will hear people talking about space, and it seems like this, oh, thing that only moms with a ton of help could do, or women without children could do, right? Who have all the independence and time. Yes. When you're not a mom, maybe you have more space available to you, but even you as a mom, even you as a co-parenting mom, even you as a single mom who is responsible for her children, 24/7, can create space. And that's what I wanted to talk about today, is tangible ways to do yourself this favor of creating some space. So I'm gonna break it down into mind, body, and soul, because that's really the three parts of us. So let's talk about creating space in our mind. Well, oftentimes, when we're telling ourselves that we, we don't have any time, that we don't even know, I don't even have time to think or to feel or to do anything, I'm just going, going, going, well, frankly, you've got to manage your mind, right? This is where we have to actually do the work of being in charge of our thinking, not letting our thinking be in charge of us, because you're thinking all the time and feeling all the time, but if you're telling yourself that you have no control of it, you're just in a victim's stance. Instead, we wanna take ownership over your thinking. Take ownership over your feelings so that you can be in charge of and direct them. So how do we do this? Well, this is what I work with my clients on, is teaching them how to manage their mind, because it is a huge part of the healing journey and the process to moving forward. But one simple shift sometimes is just getting ourselves out of the negative perspective, right? That I don't have any time, nothing's gonna change. This is how it always is. This is the way that it always goes. That kind of perspective and negative thought process creates the lens from which you see the world. And so part of the first step is just being willing to loosen the grip on that negative perspective. Now, I'm not asking you to go from, I have no time to, oh, I have all the time in the world. No, but we can start to loosen the grip and shift the perspective just a little bit. So what might that look like? Maybe you have the thought. The other co-parent is always looking for a fight. Everything he does is always looking for a fight. He's looking for ways to cut me down. He's looking for ways to prove me wrong. That is a thought loop, that is a perspective. So how can we loosen the grip on it? Well, thinking, oh, he totally is on my page or on my team, probably feels pretty far away. But what you could do is when you find yourself having that thought, oh, here we go again. He just wants to fight with me. You can just shift one step over to this is what's happening. This is what he said. Now what? Now what do I wanna do with this? That's a simple shift to put it into your control. Put it into your seat of how you want to direct and take the next step at in action. Maybe for you to transition days are really hard. Maybe your kids come back exhausted, distracted, irritable, and you just find it harder and harder to keep an upbeat, positive attitude and move through it. Maybe you get triggered. Maybe you end up feeling as exhausted and distracted as they are, and you find yourself in a thought pattern of, it always goes this way. He always sends them back this way. He always runs them ragged. And then I have to pick up the slack. Well, again, we have to loosen the grip on that perspective, because that perspective is just gonna continue to give us more and more negative. We're gonna find ourselves in that spiral. So maybe you can shift by saying, okay, they're exhausted, they're distracted, and they're with me now. What can I do now? Again, it doesn't change what's going on, but it changes you and how you're perceiving the situation, how you wanna move forward. Sometimes when we find ourselves, when the kids are gone, right? And you find yourself so overcome with the sadness, with the loneliness, not knowing what to do next. Well, part of this is we can get stuck in that negative perspective, that thought spiral, that it's always gonna be this way. I'm always gonna be alone. I hate this. I can't move through this. All of that can be there, but you can start to shift, right? Doing yourself that favor of creating some space in that moment by saying, I'm alone in this moment. I'm alone right now. What this does is it takes the brain from all of the negative projection of the future and brings it into the present moment. So you can decide, what do I wanna do right now, which leads me to doing yourself a favor of creating space in your body, right? We were just talking about the mind and our thoughts, but we also have to think about how can we create space in our body because our feelings, our physical manifestations of what's going on in our mind. And so for us, if we wanna feel differently, if we wanna feel more spacious, more at ease, more calm, more peace, we actually have to start to create space for that in our body. So I'm just gonna mention a couple ways that I think are really, really helpful. Number one, walking. Walking is like the most underrated thing. [laughter] We actually, as a species, are meant to walk a lot. This is what we do. And walking is honestly just fuel for your soul. And so finding any amount of time to walk, if you're a mom of little kids, no, maybe you can't just leave the house and go walk. You know, I found so much liberation that my son is old enough now that I can leave in the mornings, you know, and go on my morning walk. It's the first couple times it happened, it was like, I need liberation that I could do this. And maybe you're not to that point yet. Maybe your kids are littles, but can you put them in the stroller? Can you take five minutes to get around the block? Can you have someone come over, maybe even a kid in the neighborhood that you trust to spend 20 minutes with your children while you take a walk? This doesn't have to be hours and hours. It's just finding the time and creating the space to walk outside or on a treadmill right in your house, or maybe at your kids' practice, right when they're at soccer. Maybe you could just walk laps around the field, whatever it is, finding space and creating space for you to move and to walk, to just allow yourself to take in the sounds around you, what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're thinking. You know, another one for your body is to really nourish your body. This is finding ways to, whether it's cooking for yourself, finding healthy snacks, but really using what you put into your body as a act of self-love. Are you drinking enough water? Are you, what are you eating? Are you finding healthy snacks? Right? You doing these things over and over, I mean, how many moms? We don't even have a meal. We just eat scraps off of the children's plates. That's not love for yourself. So really deciding in advance that you are going to create some space that you're gonna take some time to make yourself something. Or if you're out, find something delicious for yourself that's healthy and nourishes you, because that's an act of self-love that's doing yourself, the favor of creating space to fill yourself up. And lastly, how are you creating space inside of yourself for your soul? Well, I mentioned school. This is back to school time. And so many of us feel, I know as moms, right, mornings trying to get everybody out the door is chaos. So how are you creating intentional space and time so that you are starting your day from a place of calm and ease, even with children? I swear to you, this is possible, when you decide to put yourself into a place of having space and ease and calmness. So what might that look like? That's getting everything ready the night before, so that the only thing you have to do in the morning is wake up, get dressed, have breakfast and walk out the door, right? Everything else has been done the night before. Clothes have been picked out, school lunches have been packed, school bags are by the back door. Your purse and your keys are sitting there as at the back door ready to go. Each of these little decisions, these little ways of taking five minutes the night before to say to your morning self, I got you. I've got you organized, helps to create a more calm, easeful morning. It's the little decisions and actions that we make for our future self of how am I going to set myself up to have the space that I desire, right? Having that space and the ease and the peace isn't something that just happens. It's something that you create and you create it by your decisions and your actions now that impact your future, whether that's just from the night before into the morning, or making all of these decisions over time, right? Loosening the grip on the negative perspective, moving your body more and more and more, so that you are feeling more ease, more flexibility, more joy, whether that's meditation, and listen, I know we all hear, oh, you should meditate. You should have gratitude. You should do all these things in the morning. You know what? Yeah, you should. Okay, because they just feel better. But often, sometimes we can't do it, but oftentimes we're not even really trying. And so what I want you to do is just find moments of stillness or even moments where you're moving, but you're finding quiet. That can be meditation too. That can be an intentional growing of space and ease and peace for yourself, even when you're walking down the street, even when you're walking between meetings, even when you're getting the kids off to school, there are ways to create this time and space and calm for you when you do it with intention. And nothing's perfect. It doesn't have to be perfect, but you deciding and creating the intention to do it is the first step. Really start to make the decisions of what you're spending your time and your energy and your money on, and are they filling you up? Are they allowing yourself to be going towards what you want? Are you letting yourself matter? Are you putting yourself first? Because when you do that, you have more love, you have more capacity, you have more energy, and you have more time available to those kiddos that you love so much. So I just want you to think about what is the favor that you need to do for yourself? What space do you need to create? Where are you finding yourself getting really stuck, maybe in the victimness or the negativity or the stuckness? And how can you start to use that to become the next version of you? What are the actions and what are the thoughts and what are the feelings that you need to have to start to become that version of you today so that you see the results down the road? Because you, my friend, are that butterfly. And if you're feeling the constriction now, that's just a good sign that you're ready for change. And so I want you to start thinking about how you can create space and what it is that you need to do for yourself to set yourself up for long-term gain. You can do this, my friend. I know that you can. And I'm here to support you as your mentor, as your host on this podcast. And if you're ready as your coach, just DM me and tell me you're ready, and we will get you started. I'm so grateful for you. I'm so grateful for you listening. Thank you. I love you. And until next week, take really, really good care of you, friend. 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 the 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.