Ep #163: Parenting with Purpose: Trusting Your Inner Wisdom in Difficult Moments

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, we'll get ready and let's dive into today's episode.

Hi there. Welcome back to the podcast. I'm excited to be with you. I have a topic today that I think is really going to resonate, and why do I think that? Because I have so many of my clients ask me and conversations that I have with other people that I know that oftentimes we're really struggling to know what the right answer is. We just want somebody to tell us what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. But if there was someone out there to do that, I would gladly give you that person's information. But here's the thing, and this is what we're going to talk about during those times of conflict or those times of challenges, how do you show up and how do you decide, what do you need to do? What's the next thing? How can you take care of yourself and your family and all of the things based on what really matters to you?

And that's why we can't look outside. We have to look inside, and I want to give you some really practical tips to be able to do that. Before we do, I just want to let you know that if you are struggling with co-parenting and just a quick aside, a reminder that co-parenting isn't necessarily just about divorce. Co-parenting is really parenting with other people, and so many of us are doing that unless we're on a deserted island, we're parenting with other people and other people that we don't always agree with a hundred percent of the time. That might be an ex, that might be your spouse, but you're in conflict. That could look like a number of different scenarios. And so this isn't specific to divorce, but it's really how do we show up as the parent and parenting with other people in the mix? How do we do that together?

And if you're having any trouble with that in your life, I want you to know that there is help here. Yes, I pour into you on this free resource of the podcast and I do hope that it helps, and I also have other means to help you and support you, and one of those is a breakthrough call and I offer these at no charge. They are free. And you get 20 minutes of my time to take a look at what is going on in your parenting and your co-parenting and how can you start to make some tangible shifts to start to feel better, to feel more aligned, and what would that look like? And so if you would like a little extra support in TLC, the link is in the show notes. I hope you book a call with me so that we can talk through what's going on and really help you have an actual plan of how you're going to change it for the better, to make it more positive to make your life and your children's lives better.

So that is always available. Again, it's in the show notes, so you can grab that. Okay, so today in this episode, what I want to do is help you start to have a little bit of a roadmap of how you can move forward in times of conflict, in times of stress, in challenging times so that you are truly responding and not reacting when emotions run high so that you can reconnect with what really matters to you and parent and co-parent. From that place of clarity of calm and confidence, I want to help you start to cultivate some of these ways to trust yourself, to show up in decision making, right? To make decisions that are aligned with your values, even when things are challenging. Because here's the thing, like I said at the top of the show, there's no one out there coming to rescue us and there's no one outside of us that knows the exact answer for you.

You have that inside of you. And so what we want to do is help you learn to hear and listen to your inner wisdom because that is your greatest guide. All of the answers that you need are already inside of you as a coach, as a parent, as a fellow human. My job is to help you use your values, hear your intuition so that you can help yourself navigate through a situation, right? That's also our job as parents. We don't need to have the answers or fix everything for everyone or our children, but we're really there to help guide them back to themselves so that they can find their path. And when in doubt, we want to be able to really have an anchor to decide where we go next. So I want to offer something here before we get too much further down the road.

Things change all the time. We all know that, right? There are seasons to life, there are ups and downs, and what we want to really start to do is move with that, right? It's like if life is a river, we don't want to spend all of our time trying to paddle upstream. Instead, we want to be able to be on our little life raft and be going down the river with the flow, but controlling the direction that we want to go. If we have no control, we may end up on the side or upside down, or we might, in our attempt to control everything might be paddling against the stream, and then we just get exhausted and fall over. Anyway. What we really want to do is have that calm, grounded state where we have our anchor, we have our, what's that called, a rudder, and we're guiding ourselves down the path.

Even when things get choppy, even when the river gets rough or narrow or very, very deep, you still are able to navigate it. And so one of the ways that we do that is really giving ourselves an anchor, an anchor point, and we call that values, right? Everybody has different values, so if you're driving, do this later, but if you're not, I want you to stop and take a sheet of paper and I want, you can divide it into as many blocks as you want. We can look at all areas of our lives, or today we're just going to look at parenting and co-parenting, but you could also look at your personal life, your friendships, your romantic relationships, your career, nutrition, health, wellness, whatever. But I want you to get this piece of paper and I want you to put two sort of boxes or two columns.

One is parenting, one is co-parenting, and in that I want you to write down how you want to show up. As a parent, this is how you want to show up in the good times and the hard times, how you want to show up when it's easy, when it's challenging. It could be words, it could be a couple sentences, but really ask yourself, how do I want to show up? And then as it relates to co-parenting, co-parenting with your spouse, whomever, your co-parenting with, ask yourself, how do I want to show up there? Again, same way, when it's easy, when it's hard, in the good days and the bad days, how do you want to show up? What is most important to you? And this might look like you want to be present and really patient with your kids and supportive maybe as a co-parent really being in integrity or calm or wise, clear, whatever it is for you.

You want to write that down. And then I want you to go back and without judgment, without blame, without criticism, I want you to ask yourself, give yourself a rating In the last two weeks, how aligned have you been to the way you want? And again, zero judgment. We're not blaming, we're just looking at it with curiosity to say, am I like 10% aligned? Am I 90% aligned or am I zero? And kind of giving yourself a score. Why are we doing this? Well, because when things get challenging, one, life gets, when conflict comes up, when the other co-parent is not agreeing with you or adding a bunch of drama. When you have those moments, when you're in doubt, I want you to pause and ask yourself, who do I want to be in this moment? Because that is going to be what helps guide you back to what matters to you so that you can decide how you want to move forward.

We have to really stop and do that values work. This is one of the first things that I do with each of my clients. And listen, values change the way you want to be in one season of life might vary a little bit in other seasons, or maybe it's a really challenging season and your kids or the situation calls for something else, and we have to be able to be flexible and move. So actually going back and looking and relooking at our values in different seasons is really important. So even if you've done this before, I encourage you right now to do it again. So really again, asking yourself, who do I want to be? Because what we want to start to do is be able to add more to our life so that we can show up that way. If we want to be really patient and present with our kids, we have to be really honest with ourselves.

Are we showing up that way? And if we're not, why? It might be because you're highly stressed. It might be because you're sleep deprived. It might be because there's a huge project going on or a big challenge with your kid, but being honest with yourself about saying, okay, if I'm not showing up that way, what is one thing that I could do today to shift closer to that? If you are exhausted and depleted, just totally spent, that might be a time where in order for you to feel more, let's say it was present that you wanted or more patient, well, you're going to need to take care of yourself. You're going to need to add a little bit more sleep and rest. You're going to need to add a little bit, maybe more water to your diet, good food, a little bit of exercise. We have to start looking at adding in the foundation to be able to show up that way.

And this really comes to regulation. How can we keep ourself and our nervous system more calm, more resourced for us to be able to respond versus react? We have to have the resources to do that. Our nervous system has to be in more of a grounded state. So we have to be able to take a breath. We have to be able to pause and ground ourselves. So we need tools on board, things like breath work, mindfulness, regulation, so that we can really start to have and access the clarity that is inside instead of just reacting to the stress and fear. And that is one of those things that we have to do not in the moment, but build that over time. That's why a mindfulness practice, a daily gratitude practice, a daily breath work or meditation is so important because it actually starts to build that muscle over time.

Another thing we need to start to really focus on is using those values and putting them as having more importance than our ego. What do I mean by that? Parenting challenges trigger our fears, our frustrations. They make us really competitive in the need to win, especially when we're talking about sort of co-parenting with exes or someone that you don't agree with or someone you're in a battle with. What do you want to do? You want to win, right? But we have to be willing to put our values over, our need to win over our ego, and that's where we can start to really shift by pausing and shifting and asking, am I moving more in alignment with how I want to show up? Or am I trying to win a war here? Am I trying to win a battle? It really is shifting from that ego state into our value state.

And this can look like, am I acting from love, from patience, from wisdom? Am I setting an example for my children of what it means to be a grounded, responsible, regulated and adult? If the answer isn't yes, then that's an area for us to look at, right? And this comes up when we get caught up in the drama. Listen, we've all been there. That's where there's no judgment. We're not blaming, we're not criticizing ourselves at all here, but we are needing to be a little bit more honest. And that's why it really helps to look at our values and ask ourselves, how much am I showing up in alignment with who I want to be? And if I'm not, maybe I'm getting caught up in the drama. Maybe I'm focusing solely on what I can't control instead of what I can, because we cannot control other people's behaviors.

We can't, right? The only person that we can control is ourselves. And so that's where we really focus. And this is not meaning that we just are like, oh, everybody gets to do whatever they want and I'm just going to focus on making myself happy. No, that's not what I'm talking about. But what I am talking about is deciding in these moments of conflict, what's the next right decision? Well, the next right quote unquote right decision is the one that puts you in alignment with your values. Notice I didn't say the one that gets the war to stop or for everyone to agree with you because that's not a goal that we have any control over. But what you do have control over is showing up in alignment with what matters to you most. And I'm guessing if you're listening to this, your values aren't winning at all costs or detrimental to other people.

No, you're wanting to feel grounded. You're wanting to feel autonomy, you're wanting to feel agency, and you have choice in where you go and you do. And that's why we have to really start to look inward and make those choices based on where we want to go, instead of looking outside and just trying to figure it out or have someone else tell us what to do. They don't know. They don't know what your values are, only you do. And so when we can turn inward and start to use our inner GPS, that intuition and those values to move you forward, that helps you navigate really tough situations. And when we do that, we're able to focus on how we can show up that will move the needle instead of getting caught in the blame game, instead of adding to the conflict cycle, we can actually start to move the needle and move ourselves and others towards resolution, towards a different outcome instead of just staying in that perpetual cycle.

We want to be able to make these decisions from a place of integrity, a place of honesty. And when we are really faced with really tough parenting choices or co-parenting choices, listen, we all have these moments, and oftentimes we can just get lost in the what ifs or all the assumptions we're making or all the worry and the anxiety about the future. But really, when we're faced with these tough choices, our first response needs to be to pause, to take a breath and asking what is aligned with my values? What is aligned with how I want to show up as a parent and a co-parent asking yourself, will this decision serve my child's emotional wellbeing and my own really looking at a long-term, long range versus because listen, in the moment, it feels good sometimes to lash out, to really give it to 'em, really sort of say, absolutely not.

I'm not going there. That in the short term can feel productive sometimes, but really, we have to be able to step back from a regulated, emotionally grounded place to say, what is in the long-term best interest of me, of my values for my child, for my child's wellbeing? And then really move from that place. And that takes emotional independence, that takes us being responsible. We talk a lot about responsibility here, the ability to respond, but to do that, we have to be grounded. We have to be regulated. The only way that we can help our children regulate or other people regulate is to be regulated ourselves. So that looks like calming ourselves down, choosing our responses instead of just reacting to everything, because we really want to be and lead by example for our kids. And if we are just being reactive and we're yelling and we're caught up in drama and we are continuing the cycle of conflict, that is what we're teaching.

And I'm guessing that isn't your values. And so that's where we have to start to be really honest with ourselves. Again, I'll say it a million times without judgment, without blame, without criticism, but in each and every moment we have a choice of how we want to move forward. We have a choice of what we want to do next. Even when we mess up, even when we make unquote the wrong decision, we can repair. We're not supposed to be perfect. Mistakes happen. We might make one decision, and then we get more information. We're like, oh, wrong decision, right? We can always move and shift. And that's really that sort of analogy of being able to float down the river as something comes up, we learn something, we shift and we move. But to do that, we have to really be in a more present grounded state and know where we're headed.

Again, have that sort of anchor point of our values to help us show up. It's not about perfection, right? Sometimes we need to apologize, sometimes we need to repair and we need to shift. And when we're able to do that, we actually create more goodness in our life. We create more connection in our lives, and we become the example to our children that we really want them to see. And so that is where we really want to look from. That's the point that using our values and that little exercise of being able to write it down, analyze, how much am I showing up as that now? And if it's not what you want, then how can I start to shift? How can I use those values to guide each and every decision? The easy ones and the hard ones, the tough decisions and the things that are easier to go.

But we need to be able to really anchor ourselves in what matters most to you. And this isn't from a selfish place, but it's from a loving place, wanting to be the best version of you for your children, for the other co-parent, for the people in your life that you love, for yourself, first and foremost, for you. Because when you are showing up from a place of values, when you are responding and not reacting to life, you just feel better, you feel more confident, you're able to navigate the tough situations without being consumed by it, you're able to continue to move forward. And that's what I want for you. I want you feeling confident and grounded. And yeah, you might not know exactly how to get somewhere, but you start to actually move the needle and get yourself moving in that direction. That's what I want for you.

I hope that this helps give you an idea of one place to start to look at how can I start to get my parenting a little bit more back on track so that I am showing up with intention, with emotional steadiness, and most importantly, how can I trust myself to be the parent and co-parent that I want to be? You can do this, my friend. I promise you. I have a hundred percent belief in you to create a life for you, your family, and the other co-parent that is based in values, that is based in integrity, that is aligned with where you want to go, that is respectful, and you are in charge of your side of that. And so I hope these things help you start to take a little bit more agency over that today. Alright, until next time, sending you much love and many blessings, and I'll see you then. 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.