Ep #36: The Great Expectations

I'm Mikki Gardner, and this is the Co-Parenting with Confidence Podcast, Episode Number 36, The Great Expectations. [music] 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. [music] Welcome, friend. Thank you for joining me today. I know that there are so many great podcasts you could be listening to and so many things you could be doing, and I'm grateful that you're here with me in this moment. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about what I want for this podcast, and my intention is to truly provide support and love to the moms who are going through the journey of divorce and co-parenting. Why? Because we all want life to be better for our kids, right? I know that that's true for me, and I believe that it's true for you too. I want our kids to be stronger, healthier and happier versions than we've been, and the way that we do that is that we become stronger, healthy and happier moms. Listen, with all the craziness that's been going on in the world, I firmly believe it is our time as moms to speak up, to stand up, and to take our place at the table. It's moms who are gonna change the world, and we're gonna change it by changing our world, our families, ourselves, everything we touch, and we do this by supporting each other, doing our own work, showing up with strength, with honesty, and with love. And if you're listening to this, I truly believe that you share this vision with me, and I wanna thank you for being here with me and for listening, and I'd like to ask you a favor before we dive in. If you're enjoying these conversations, if you're finding it useful, I would be so grateful if you would rate and review this show. When you do that, it allows other women to find the safe, loving, healing space. And when we share the love, we are changing our world in small but powerful ways. So today, I really wanted to talk about expectations. If there's anything that I see in my clients and I know certainly from my past, there are two emotions that I see a lot of when we're talking about divorce and co-parenting, and that's disappointment and regret. You know, whenever I'm looking at an emotion, Brené Brown is really the leading researcher in emotion. Her brilliant work has impacted my life and my work so much, and so I was really looking into these two emotions, and so I wanna talk a little bit about some of the research that she found. Brené found that both disappointment and regret arise when an outcome was not what we wanted, counted on, or thought that it would be. With disappointment, we often feel the outcome was out of our control. With regret, we believe the outcome was caused by our decisions or our actions. So regret is one of those areas that when we look at, what we regret most in life is those failures of using courage, whether it was the courage to be kinder, to show up more, to say how we feel, to set a boundary, to be good to ourselves, to say yes to something scary, right? Any of those things, when we fail to do that, we're living outside of our values, we're living outside of what is important to us, and that creates regret. And one of the reasons that Brené finds that we resist or avoid regret is because it's often accompanied by an element of self-blame and guilt, and I know that we all can feel as moms that the mom guilt really get to us. And when we're talking about divorce and co-parenting, mom guilt gets taken to a whole nother level, right? Because there's the regret of what didn't happen, what we couldn't do, what our life was supposed to be, and that leads me to the part of the conversation that I wanted to talk about today, which is expectations. But first, we have to talk about disappointment. Why? Because Brené Brown defines disappointment as an unmet expectation. The more significant expectation, the more significant the disappointment. And avoiding disappointment is one area that I see moms get really stuck. You know, disappointment is one of the most frequently experienced emotions, and it tends to be experienced on a really high level of intensity, right? We do not like disappointment. We try to avoid it in our own lives, and I see a lot of women, and I know I've done this myself, try to avoid it for my children, right? I don't want my son to feel the disappointment, that sting of disappointment, and so we try to pretzel ourselves or the world around them to avoid it, but this is really a disservice because we aren't resolving the issue at hand, we're just trying to figure out how to change everything around us, and so what we really need to focus on is expectations, right? And what an unmet expectation is. So every day, we are consciously and unconsciously setting expectations for ourselves and all of the people in our lives. The problem comes in when we have unconscious un-examined and un-expressed expectations, because those are what can quickly turn to disappointment and even resentment. Basically, what we're doing with an expectation is we're painting a picture in our head of how things should be and what they should look like. Sometimes we go so far as... I mean, we can really feel it, right? We can taste it, we can smell it. We know exactly what it would feel like if everyone did this one thing or thought this one thing, or acted this one way. We set those expectations not only on how we are in this picture, but also how those around us are in this picture. But what this means is that we are creating a picture that is completely outside of our control, because we don't have control over how other people think, feel and act, right? The movie in our head, that story that we're telling ourselves is amazing in our head. When it doesn't play out that way, this is When disappointment quickly follows. And here's the thing, when we're co-parenting, the communication has changed, the physical proximity to the other person has changed, the rules have changed, and if we don't change our expectations to meet that, this is when we're setting ourselves up for disappointment and resentment, right? Too often we expect our ex to behave in a very particular way to say what they should say, what they shouldn't say, what they do or what they shouldn't do, right? And then when they fail to act that way, when they fail to meet the picture that we've painted in our head, we use it as ammunition to create more disconnection, drama, mass, and anger. We're expecting things to be different and then blaming them for our upset-ness. When we do this, we are giving away the power that we do have, right? The power that we have is over how we think, feel and act, how we experience a situation, but when we are not in control or even aware of our expectations, this is where we get into trouble. There are a few common areas that I see moms really struggle with this when they're co-parenting. One is the idea that, "He should be helping me out more," whether this is the kids, the other co-parent, right? It's this expectation that they should be doing X, Y, and Z. But what I often find underneath that is that we're not asking for what it is that we need. We're not being clear and saying, "This is the expectation," right? And so we're not creating boundaries, we're not creating clear expectations of how things are going to be, and so things are murky, things are un-expressed, and then it's not met and then we're disappointed. When I see a lot of my clients struggle with this, "He should communicate better. He should communicate in this way," then when the ex doesn't communicate either at all or in the way that they want them to, they end up frustrated, ruminating on all the things that should have happened, arguing, and ultimately not communicating in the way that they want. Another one that I see often is, it's tinged with regret, but it's also an unmet expectation, in that, "My kid shouldn't still be having trouble," right? My kid shouldn't have trouble with the transitions." It's been two years, or something that sounds like that. And really, we have to look at, What is the expectation? What is the expectation of how they should feel about it, and do we like that? How are we showing up for the transition time? Are we adding to the drama, or are we allowing for it and helping to resolve it?" These examples are short, but what they do is they offer a sort of a glimpse into the fact that when we are not aware of this picture that we have in our head and we're just expecting people to know how to act or what to do, we're really not being clear. We're not showing up in our highest self, we're not creating boundaries, we're not expressing our need, asking for help. We have a movie or a story playing in our head that is in conflict with what is actually happening, and that is what is creating the majority of the suffering, not necessarily the other person, but our expectation of it, and is that expectation one, one that we agree with, and two, one that we wanna hang on to? So what we need to do is really peel back the layers of these expectations. Look at all the ways that we are shoulding on ourselves, meaning, telling ourselves that we should act a certain way, other people should act a certain way, "People should think this of me, they shouldn't think this of me. Our kids should act one way. They shouldn't act a different way," right? Whenever we hear the word should, it is a giant, giant red flag. Any time we hear ourselves say should, "I should do this. I shouldn't do that. He should do this, he shouldn't do that," I really want you to stop and use it as an opportunity to get curious, right? "Is there an expectation here? Do I have an unmet expectation that's going to lead to disappointment and resentment?" And if so, am I willing to pull back the layers and look at it?" So how do we pull back the layers? So I'm gonna go through one of the exercises that I use often with my clients, and it's this idea of having a manual. A manual is a set of rules or almost instruction guide for how everyone in our lives, how we expect them to behave so that we can feel good, so that we can be happy. The manual in and of itself isn't necessarily the problem. The problem comes in when we aren't telling the other person what our manual said, right? And often, we actually don't even realize that we have this or see that it's creating pain for us. We feel that the other person should just know what to do and how to treat us. Can you relate? Right? So it's not having expectations of other people is the problem, but what is, is when we are tying our emotional health directly to how well they meet those expectations, how well they behave in that certain way, if they are meeting the painting in the picture that we have in our head. So what we wanna do is explore, "What are these expectations? What are these rules that I have? And do I like them? Do I want to work through them?" And we do that by a series of questions by, again, pulling back the layers to uncover what is the unexpressed or unmet expectation that I'm struggling with. So I'm gonna give you some questions that you can ask yourself, and you could always sort of timestamp this and come back to it, or just write them down on a sheet of paper, and then after you're done listening, go through these. The first thing is pick somebody that you wanna... Whether it's your ex, someone that you're struggling with, but write down their name at the top of the sheet of the paper. And then underneath that, write in detail what you would like them to do. Be really specific. How should they behave? How should they treat you? How should they communicate with you? Like write all of it down. Really just let yourself put everything on that sheet of paper. And then for each of those items that you would like them to do, go back and write down why you want them to behave in this way. So once you have that, you go back again through each of them and then you ask yourself, "How do I think I would feel if they behaved in this way? What would my thoughts about them change if they behave that way?" And then ask yourself this question, "Do I want them to behave this way?" And then the last question is, when someone wants you to behave in a certain way to make them feel good, what is that like for you? When someone has an expectation of how you're supposed to think, feel and act so that they feel better, how do you experience that? By going through these questions and allowing yourself to sort of pull back those layers, that helps you understand, "What are the expectations that I have, and then do I like them? Are they serving me? Do they help me show up in a way that I want, and if not, what do I wanna do about that?" And there's a number of ways that you can sort of then go back to creating healthier expectations. One is letting go of the ones that don't work, just sort of deciding, "I'm gonna choose to work on not having that expectation because I end up feeling disappointed." The first step in this is really starting to get very clear and aware. What do I mean? When somebody consistently acts in a certain way, but we have this idea and this expectation of how they should act, you can see where the conflict comes in, and then we just get disappointed and frustrated when they fail to meet our expectations. So really, the most powerful thing we can do is actually expect the way that they act. Have the expectation that they're gonna show up in this way, maybe that we don't like, right? Maybe your ex is a horrible communicator, maybe he refuses to communicate, but you keep sending texts or emails thinking, "If I can just find the nicest way to say it, if I could just find the right word, then he's gonna communicate with me," right? Have you ever been there? Really instead, the most empowering thing we can do for ourselves that you can do is to expect he's not going to. He's not gonna communicate in the way that you want, and accept it. And when I say accept it, I'm not saying that you have to agree with it, that you have to condone it, that you have to think that it's amazing. No, not at all. But it's first just saying, "I expect that he's not going to meet this picture that I have in my head. I'm gonna accept that, meaning I'm gonna stop resisting and fighting against it, and I'm gonna choose how I wanna show up, even when he does this," right? And this might look like, I know for my ex-husband, great guy, not the best with time, right? [chuckle] My son and I joke that we know that there's sort of like the dad time that has to be built in. When he says he's gonna be there at a certain time, it's actually probably gonna be 30 to 60 minutes later, right? And so at first, I would get very frustrated. I would be very annoyed. I would have things lined up. If he was gonna pick up at 3 o'clock, I needed to be out the door by 3:10 to do this, this and this. And then he wouldn't be there, and then I'm just mad, right? All my plans are getting pushed out, I'm angry, but what I needed to do was learn that actually he wasn't going to be there at exactly that moment. But where my power lies is in how I dealt with it. So I started learning that we had to adjust how I was going to plan things to accommodate for this. I could continue to keep fighting to get him to be on time, or I could adjust around it and create ease and freedom for myself and my son. And so it's like a little moment, but it's across the board when we start to really look at what are we expecting out of other people? When they fail to act that way, how are we feeling about it? And how are we showing up? Because all of my power, all of your power lies in your experience of what's happening in the world, not your ability to control it but how you're thinking and feeling and therefore acting. You know, the present moment is where all of our power lies, and so that's where we wanna meet it, not in the expectation of what we think should be happening, but actually looking at what is happening, and then how do we want to control ourselves around that, how do we wanna show up in the most loving, confident, honest way. Listen, I get that it is a whole lot easier to be disappointed and blame your ex, your past, your kids for the things that they did, that they do, that they say, that they think, right? Than to experience the disappointment and value yourself enough to pull back layers of those expectations, and to stand up and address something that needs to be addressed, right? But this is the work, to get really honest about the stories that you've created in your mind and then reconcile them against what is happening in real life and take ownership of what you can, namely, how you're thinking and how you're feeling about it, because that dictates how you're acting, that dictates your experience. When we're able to do this work, it is what allows us to show up as the strongest, most loving, most confident version of you, no matter what anybody else is doing, and that ultimately is what we want. So I know that we've just scratched the surface of expectations. This is a huge, huge topic, and one that I dive into with my clients all the time. And if this episode has sort of triggered something in you or resonated with you and you're ready to explore those expectations that are holding you back, then I wanna invite you to join me for a free workshop that I'm hosting on Monday, June 27th at 2:00 PM Eastern. Don't worry. If you can't make it live, there's always replays, but I do love to see your beautiful faces there. In this expectations workshop, we're gonna take a deep dive into the process of examining and releasing those harmful expectations and then creating healthy expectations that serve you. It is such powerful work, and I'm so excited for this workshop to be working with you together so that you can walk away feeling more empowered, more confident, and in more control of your experience. So if you wanna grab your spot, just go to www.mikkigardner.com/workshop. The link is gonna be in the show notes, so you can just click it and sign up and grab your spot today. If you know anyone who would benefit from this or the workshop coming up, please share it with them. I love when you share the love, or share it on Instagram and tag me. I would love to have a conversation with you there. But I wanted to say thank you for spending this time with me. I'm always so, so grateful to be here with you. And 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 co-parentingwithconfidence.com. I'll see you next week. [music]