Ep #15: How to Decide What’s Next

I’m Mikki Gardner, and this is the Co-Parenting with Confidence podcast, episode number 15, How to Decide What’s Next. Welcome to Co-Parenting with Confidence, a podcast for those courageous moms out there who want to move past the conflict and frustration of divorce and show up as the mom they truly want to 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. Welcome, friend. I’m excited that you’re back here with me. I have a question: do you ever get stuck in trying to decide what the right decision is? What you should do next? What you should do so that other people won’t get mad? What you should do so that your kids will listen? Well, that’s what we’re talking about today, and what the mechanics are of a decision. In these January episodes, we’ve been talking a lot about building an intentional life—being purposeful and conscious in our decisions. Why? Because if we want to feel in control, we have to be really clear and focused on what we have control over. So, in episodes 12 and 13—if you haven’t listened, I encourage you to go back. But we’ve been talking about the pillars of the work that I do in my own life and with my clients. And it begins with “awareness.” That is a deep dive into self-discovery, into self-knowledge. Really, it’s about uncovering all of those limiting beliefs, the thought patterns that block us and hold us back from being the woman, the mom, and the human that we really want to be. Then we talked a lot about “allowing.” This is the ability and the skill of learning to accept and allow what is true versus the story that we tell ourselves. Why do we want to be able to allow? So that we can be the calm, cool, and collected mom, woman, and co-parent that we want to be, even when there’s a raging storm outside. So, today, we’re really going to talk about the last two pillars, and that’s “agency” and “aligned action.” So, agency is really recognizing the choices and options that are available to you in any given situation and then putting yourself in the position to make a conscious choice. That conscious choice is aligned action. That’s all about creating the confidence and trust within yourself to take the next step, the next conscious decision. The one that is living not reactively but responsively and intentionally. So, how many times have you asked yourself, “What choice do I have? I didn’t have a choice. I had to do it. I couldn’t not say anything. Then he’d win. I couldn’t let her totally get away with that.” Or we tell ourselves that we just don’t have any choices. Or we either rock the boat or we keep the peace. We either speak up or it starts a fight. So, we tell ourselves that we have no choice—that we’re stuck. And you know what this creates for us? Stuck feelings. Being able to see the options available and then decide what to do next, how to take that aligned action of what we want to do, not what the outside world is telling us we should do, requires us to be anchored, grounded, and really trusting our truth and our wisdom. You might say to me, “I don’t have wisdom. I don’t even know what to do next. I don’t even know how to get through the day.” And I know that there are periods in life when we definitely all feel this way. And often, when we’re in conflict or our relationships are struggling or they’re painful, we have a really hard time because everything feels like it’s just this big, jumbled mess. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Often, it’s really hard to make a decision when it feels like everything is just tied together in this really tight ball of yarn and it’s all knotted up and we can’t even see where to begin. So, what we have to start to do is untangle it. Before we can resolve anything, before we can decide what that next right-aligned action is, we have to unwind that big, giant knot. And then we’re going to sort it. So, what do I mean by this? It’s really starting to, when we have the awareness and in that allowing process, what we’re doing is we’re unwinding the yarn. We’re pulling it apart. We’re just looking for one little string and we’re kind of pulling that apart. Once we start to get some flexibility around it and it starts to separate a little bit, then we can start to put it into piles. What piles? Well, there’s “my work” and then there’s “their work.” So, “my work” is all the things that I have to deal with, that I have control over—my thoughts, my feelings, and my actions. “Their work” is what they have control over. All too often, we’re trying to do somebody else’s work. How many times have you focused on the other person? “Well, if they just wouldn’t do this, then I wouldn’t have to act that way.” “If my kid would just listen and pick up the toys, I wouldn’t have to yell all the time.” “If my ex would just be more communicative, we could get something done.” So, do you see in each one of these, we’re looking at the other person’s work versus our own? And this is where we really start to get into trouble. Because this is a never-ending battle. Because it’s always focused on what isn’t ours to do. And here’s the thing, the spoiler alert: people don’t like to be told what to do. I know I don’t. And I don’t like when other people are trying to fix me. It’s very irritating. And it makes me want to separate. But so often, I find myself trying to fix, trying to change. Why? So that I feel better, or that I can avoid an uncomfortable conversation, or I don’t have to sit with the feelings of people being unhappy with me. So, that allowing component is really the process of starting to let go of trying to change all the people, all the circumstances, all the things, and focusing more on what I can change. And what can I change? My thoughts, my feelings, and my actions. So, when we start to unwind that pile—unwind the tight knot of where everything’s just smashed together—I have to be willing to be really honest with myself. You have to be honest with you. And become aware of what you’re thinking, what you’re feeling, and how you’re acting. It’s really about shifting our brain from them onto ourselves. Shifting from blame to taking ownership. Why? Because this is where our power lies. It’s about you choosing who you want to be and making conscious decisions from that place. This isn’t weakness. This is power. And this definitely isn’t releasing other people from responsibility. Not at all. But it’s actually handing them the responsibility that’s theirs, saying, “I’m not longer going to spend all of my time, all of my energy, and all of my emotions trying to change something that isn’t mine to change.” It’s about being able to see—to have agency and see all the choices available, and then choosing intentionally how we want to respond. I mean, here’s the thing: it sounds lovely when I’m talking about it. But often, the choices available, we might not like any of them. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have choices. And so, can we decide which one is the next step for us? Which one gets us closer to being the mom that we want to be? One of my most favorite quotes of all time—and I don’t even remember who said or where I heard it, but it’s stuck with me deep in my bones... And I think I’ve said it already in the podcast, which, clearly, I really like it. “You don’t have to engage in every fight you’re invited to.” I was like, “What?” We often think we have to. If someone’s coming at us, we have to react. But when we engage in every fight thinking we have to, we’re giving up our control. We’re living in reaction mode versus responsive mode. We make decisions that make us feel like shit later. We’re telling ourselves that we have no choice, when really we do. The most powerful thing we can do, especially with an ex who is confrontational or a child who’s acting out, is not to meet them at their level, but to choose to do our work and show up from that place of power. To show up as that tall, grounded oak tree that I’ve talked about so many times. That our roots are so deep in the ground, that regardless of the chaos and the wind and the storm flying around from all the people in our life, we’re grounded. We’re showing up the way that we want to be. And that’s having the awareness of what’s happening, allowing ourselves to be where we are, allow other people to have their feelings and their thoughts without holding onto it or making it mean something about us. So, how do we begin to untangle this mess and see what our work is? It’s that awareness. It’s those thoughts and feelings. It’s really about connecting to the present moment. And then allowing ourselves to be uncomfortable sometimes. Allowing the pain to be there. Pain in life is inevitable. It’s just part of the human experience. But when we’re so attached to not feeling the pain or trying not to feel the pain or giving the pain to somebody else, we’re resisting it. And when we resist it, we create more of it. When we create more of it, we suffer. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. So, this is really about handing other people their work and refusing to do it for them anymore. Refusing to give them all of your time, attention, and energy. And so, we’re going to talk about three ways that we can do this. The first two ways that I’m going to talk about are really help for when we’re in active conflict—when something’s going on, maybe in those moments when we tend to just react, and we need a minute. As soon as we feel like all of—for me, it’s like everything’s just rising. It’s boiling. Everything’s coming up and I’m feeling like I’m going to be overtaken. That’s a moment for me to ground into the moment. And what we need to do here is separate the fear of the “what if” from the reality of what is. So, I’m going to use maybe your kids. I know when my son is acting out or struggling or backtalking or resisting—whatever it is—in that moment that they’re going through and having their struggle, oftentimes we feel like if we don’t do something, it’s going to last forever. We’re afraid that we’re going to get stuck in it, that we’re going to have to feel all of those feelings over and over. So, when that happens, we have to learn to separate it. Part of the untangling. We need to be aware of what we’re thinking and drop into the present moment by asking ourselves, “What is true here?” versus the story that I’m telling myself. “What are my fears about where this is going to go? What is going on here and now that I need to be aware of? How can I help or solve the problem of what’s happening now without making it mean anything about the future?” Even just as that person is having their struggle, it’s refusing to meet them where they are and instead, ask yourself, “What’s really happening versus what I’m thinking? Am I worrying about the future?” Worry is just a prayer for chaos. It will always create more chaos in our head. So, we have to step back, ground into the present moment. This is where all of that work from meditation, from pausing, from taking a breath can help us ground into what is happening and actually see things more clearly. The second thing is to separate your feelings from the other person. So, many of us mistakenly believe that if someone else is having a painful feeling or an angry feeling or any negative feeling, that we have to feel it too. This comes up a lot with our children, because if we’re really a loyal and caring mother, we have to feel the pain that they’re feeling, right? No. Uh-uh. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our kids don’t need us to just sort of settle down and dig into the pain with them. Our children are their own beings, just like our ex is their own person, our boss who we might be in conflict with is their own person. They are separate from us. We need to separate and create a boundary between how they’re feeling and ours. And we do this by asking ourselves, “What am I feeling right now as this person in front of me is having big feelings? How can I separate the two things? What do I need in this moment to deal with the feelings that I’m having?” Because inevitably, asking these questions, taking that pause, we are not engaging in the fight that we’re being invited to. Instead, we are giving ourselves the space to make a conscious decision of how we want to respond. This is aligned action. This is seeing what choices are available instead of thinking, “I have to react.” No. What are the choices here? “Can I walk away? Can I hang up the phone?” Whatever the decision is, we can do that from a place of a conscious choice versus a reactionary choice. So, the last option that I’m going to talk about isn’t for in the moment. It’s really about untangling the mess when we have the time and space to do so. And it’s based on the psychological term called “self-confrontation.” It’s the willingness to look at yourself honestly. To be truly honest with yourself and to be willing to see the good, the bad, and the ugly. Because we all have all of those things. So, how does this work? Well, it really is being willing to stand in front of the mirror, look yourself in the eyes with compassion. Not judging. Not blaming. But with curiosity. When we can go and do that, when we can be curious, we ask ourselves the following questions: “What is it like to be a co-parent with me? What are the benefits that the other co-parent receives? What am I amazing with? Where are my weaknesses? What could I do better with?” And then with whatever problem or conflict that you are struggling with, you ask yourself, “How do I contribute to insert the problem?” That last question, that’s your work. Again, because we can focus on why the other person is the problem all day long. But that doesn’t help us stop being the problem and start becoming the solution. Sometimes, to get to the other side of a conflict, to get to a co-parenting relationship that is healthy and functioning, we have to rock the boat. To get to the other shore, sometimes we got to rock the boat to get going. We have to allow ourselves to be really uncomfortable, to sit with the discomfort, the messiness, and the unhappiness. We have to let other people have their negative emotions, to release control of needing to try to change how they respond and decide to be okay, even when there’s chaos, even when there’s conflict, even when we don’t like the way that they’re showing up. It about not letting their emotions mean something about you. Listen, this process is not easy, and this is what I guide my clients through every day. And often, doing the self-reflection work can be really hard. And that’s where having a life coach or a therapist really can be so helpful because it’s someone to walk with you. Someone to see from the outside those things that are really hard to see within ourselves. But just being able to do this work on your own—to look in the mirror and be willing to ask yourself these questions kind of over and over until you get to an answer—can be profound. And so, I really encourage you to do this. Because this process is totally worth it. Because you grow. You get to take that growth with you wherever you go. The other person—your ex, the kids, whomever—they might not change. But you do get the benefit. Your children absolutely do get the benefit because you are stopping the negative pattern. You are stopping the cycle of reaction and then feeling like crap later. You are choosing to show up intentionally. And when we choose from a place of intention—when we consciously choose—even when we make the mistake, even when it doesn’t go the way that we want it to, we naturally feel just better about it because we were clear, we decided, and we let ourselves make those mistakes without meaning anything. We’re all going to make mistakes. It’s what you do next. I’m constantly saying that to my son. We all act in ways that we don’t want to. We all show up differently than how we really truly want to. But it’s what we do next. And that’s where all of this work comes into play. So, that’s the show for today. My hope is that through these last few episodes, this information has offered you a new perspective and some tangible ways to step into creating an intentional life. To be more aware of who you are and less attached to what you think should be happening so that you are able to respond to your life. To go with it. While you might not be able to control a lot of things in the world—none of us can—you certainly have a ton of influence, and this work is about showing up in your truth, in your authentic self. To be an influencer of love and strength and goodness in your family. It’s possible. I know this to be true. And I’m not saying we’re seeking perfection. I am certainly not perfect and make mistakes every single day. But being willing to do this work at least gives me the confidence and the trust in myself to keep showing up and to keep trying my best to influence my world in the best way I can. And that’s what I want for you. If you’re ready to take this one step further, I want you to join me next Friday, January 21^st—well, I guess when you’re hearing this, it’s in a couple days... So, for a free workshop. It’s called the Align Your Life workshop. This is a workshop for courageous moms who are tired of living their life on everyone else’s terms and are ready to step into the confidence to create the life that they really want to live, not the one that they’re told they should be living. It’s going to be one hour we’re together. We’re really going to learn how to stop the confusion and the worry about making the quote-unquote “right decision.” Stop second-guessing your choices and learn to start taking action and make decisions that create the abundance and create the balance of the life you truly want to live. So, just go to www.MikkiGardner.com/Workshop to save your spot, and the link will be in the show notes for sure. And one last thing: if you know, have a friend, or know a mom who could really benefit from this, please share this podcast with her so that she can have more peace and alignment in the world. The more we share this, the more we’re doing for ourselves, for our kids, for our friends, and for the world at large. Thank you so much for spending time with me. As always, I am so, so grateful that you’re here, and I’ll see you next week. In the meantime, take really good care of you. Bye, friend. 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.