Ep #125: The True You - A Conversation of Authenticity with Kasia Bradford

Mikki: 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.

Mikki: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm really excited to be with you again, and if you've been here for a while, thank you. Thank you for listening. Thank you for showing up, and thank you for doing the work to expand and grow in your own life. And if you're new here, welcome. I'm really excited that you found us. I really believe wholeheartedly that every mom has the capacity to create a harmonious home for herself and her kids after divorce, regardless of what the other co-parent is doing. But what I also know is that divorce and the business of divorce is all about separation, about taking sides, about defining ownership, about creating fences to contain each parent. Co-parenting from this place though only perpetuates the isolation. It fuels the ongoing conflict, and it creates more problems when things aren't followed. So instead on this podcast, what I wanna talk about is healthy co-parenting, which means living in alignment with you and your children's wellbeing, really focusing and showing up in support of that wellbeing.

Mikki: Because when you do, you naturally build a home, an environment for you and your kids to thrive in even after divorce. And that's why in the month of March, I'm gonna be offering some of my new co-parenting wellness audits. What is this? Well, it's a really easy short time period way for you to start to get clarity, balance, and movement. Taking action towards your wellbeing in the direction you wanna go. I see so many co-parents getting triggered by what the other co-parent is doing or saying that they end up just simply reacting, reacting to what they are doing, not necessarily how they want to be responding, but just reacting. And it simply creates more mess and more frustration, and it's stressful and it's just exhausting. But you don't have to parent from this place. I want you to think about and go check out.

Mikki: There's gonna be a link in the show notes, but check out my co-parenting audit. What I do is I walk you through a comprehensive and thorough evaluation of your life in co-parenting. You're gonna be guided through this so you can really define and pinpoint what's working and what's not. And then you and I together on a call are going to work through and prioritize what is the area of concern, and we're gonna create a plan for you to start to move it in a positive direction. And here's the best part. I want you to experience the magic of coaching. And this is really what happens when we are in conversation with one another. So for two weeks, you are going to get that private support with me via Voxer to your own channel where I help you stay focused and stay intentional as you implement these changes.

Mikki: This is a highly personalized and supported coaching experience, and I'm not gonna offer it for long, but it was so popular in February. I wanna offer it again here in March. It is only $297. It is a limited time. Please do not miss your chance to do this. So you can go to the link in the show notes. You can also go over to my bio on Instagram and it's in there too. So let's get onto the podcast for today. I had the wonderful opportunity to be on the True You Series. It was an incredible series of self-empowerment and authenticity, hosted by a friend and colleague of mine, Kasia Bradford. She is an empowerment coach and an all around amazing human. The conversation was really powerful, and I wanted to share it here with you today because I just think we all need some perspective, some reframing and some decisions to make about how do we want to parent and co-parent.

Mikki: And my friend you are in control of this. You get to decide not your ex, not the courts, not your family, not your friends, not that random person on Facebook that's telling you what to do. No, you get to decide. And we do that by being very intentional, being purposeful, and focusing on what it is that you want, focusing on your wellbeing. And this is a beautiful conversation that highlights it. So I just wanted to share it here. Thank you Kasia Bradford so much for having me on your series. I cannot wait to collaborate with you again, and I hope you get a lot out of this conversation. So without further ado, let's take a listen.

Kasia: Mikki is a certified life and conscious parenting coach. She's also the host of the Co-parenting with Confidence podcast. She's a bestselling author of The People-Pleasers Guide to Co-Parenting Well, and she's a mom to her son. After navigating her own divorce hurdles and emerging Stronger on the other side, she has made it her mission to help other moms co-parent with calm and confidence, even if their ex isn't on board. So, so excited to have you with us Mikki.

Mikki: Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited to be here.

Kasia: Yay. Well, I'm gonna put the spotlight on you. Why don't you share a little bit of your background, your story, and how you got to be doing the work that you're doing today?

Mikki: Sure. Thank you. Well, thank you for having me. And I love talking about co-parenting, all things co-parenting. And I just wanna put out, I'd like to say that I define co-parenting slightly different than other people because when we hear co-parenting, we think divorce, and of course that is co-parenting. I also define co-parenting as parenting with anyone you don't agree with 100% of the time. So it's kind of all of us, because there's a lot of times, even if you are in a relationship or in a partnership where you don't see eye to eye, you don't have maybe the same value or the same ideas on how you're gonna do something. And this really is one of the things that impacts children so much. And so this is what I'm so passionate about talking about is how do we support our children in a more calm and conscious way?

Mikki: And I came to this by way of through my own life experience. I thought that I had built a life that was gonna stand the test of time, and that my marriage was gonna last. And I had done all the things, I had checked all the boxes for the happy life, and in what felt like an instant, everything was gone. And for me, it was really, it destroyed me. It gutted me, is the only word that I can use. We worked really hard and tried to keep the marriage together, but ultimately, due to everything going on, it wasn't gonna be a fit. And I realized that it was gonna be better for us to be two healthier versions of ourselves in separate houses than it was for us to try to stay in one house. And so I had no examples of divorce.

Mikki: My parents have been married 55+ years, their parents, it just went on and on, and I didn't have any friends that were divorced at the time. So I really knew no one and I set out on this journey to become the best divorce co-parent that you have ever witnessed. And I muscled my way through it like a bulldozer. Like I do everything else. And a couple years later, I found myself in a really similar place of just being really gutted and broken. And most importantly, I tell the story in my book. My son was having a hard time. He was struggling. He was showing all the signs, and I was very angry. 'Cause I thought I did it all right. I'm not arguing, I'm not doing this. Why is he struggling? And what was going on is I wasn't able to be present with him for his struggles because I wasn't present to what my experience was.

Mikki: And it was only through that process that I really started to do the inner work, the self-reflection, the awareness to understand what's actually happening here and how can I move through it differently. And I believe wholeheartedly that every mom, every parent, but I love moms, every mom has the capability of creating a harmonious home for herself and her children, even post divorce, even when things don't look the way that you want. And we do that by really learning how to be present with ourselves and learning how to reduce our reactivity so that we can really be there for our children in a better way.

Kasia: Wow. So much there.

Mikki: So much.

Kasia: So much there.

Mikki: Sorry. Threw that at you.

Kasia: Yeah. Yeah. No, amazing. Amazing. So I'll start with the last thing you said that you believe that every mom can have a harmonious home and you have a son. Yes?

Mikki: I do. Yeah.

Kasia: Yeah. So something that I've been seeing a lot of lately, and I'm not sure why, again, it's showing up on my social medias, but it's this notion that single moms can't raise well adjusted sons. So what do you think about that?

Mikki: [laughter] I think they're completely wrong. I think, here's the thing, we're both whatever gender you subscribe to, right? We are all just naturally, both sort of a female and male. We're both sort of that energetic of both sides of it, the masculine and the feminine, and both are very necessary. I will say from my perspective, it has been really important to me. My son's father is in his life, but it's been really important to me to really look at what are role models of healthy masculinity, of healthy men. And I have made it a point to encourage those relationships for my son because I'm not an example of healthy masculinity or what it looks like to be a man. I can tell him my perspective, but it's also, I think understanding we can't be everything. And I think that's what I really tried at the beginning.

Mikki: I was like, oh, I'm gonna be everything, everything he could ever need. Well, I was just frantic and anxious and stressed out versus really stepping back and understanding, learning how to lead from my intuition, my inner knowing, being self-reflective of what are my strengths, what are my weaknesses? And then balancing that out. When we're able to be more conscious, more awake, and start to understand what can we do and what can't we do, and what's within our control and what's outside of our control. We can start to make really intentional decisions and make choices that support who you wanna be to your parent. I'm a firm, firm believer that a child needs one healthy, grounded, safe parent. If they get two, fantastic, that's amazing, but they only really need one. And so instead of trying to be everything, just be that one healthy, safe, grounded parent and regardless of gender, regardless of other things. And I think they'll take it from there.

Kasia: Yeah, I love that you say that. I've been hearing that a lot lately too. [laughter] I don't know why I'm listening to this stuff. My son is almost 18, so I'm like, it's not applicable, but I've been hearing this as long as there is one. So can you speak a little bit to that? How do we start to do the work, especially if we're going through, well maybe no, maybe start with the two parents co-parenting still in a marriage, but just completely on different pages when it comes to parenting.

Mikki: So here's the biggest thing that I think we see, and it doesn't matter whether it's what's going on. I think this is just part of being a human at this point. We are highly reactive. If you look at what is going on in the world. I'm in the States, we're just a breeding ground for all examples of reactivity. But what we really have to learn to do, and there's a framework that I teach to my clients in my book, is a simple framework to understand how we can reduce our reactivity. Meaning we're not just reacting to everything that comes at us, but we're really in a more grounded, calm state where we can be present and make decisions about where do I wanna go? It looks like being more aware of what's happening, not just in that autopilot, reactive mode. And then from that awareness starting to understand, okay, what do I have control over?

Mikki: And the second step is really agency. It's a fancy word for choice. We always have choices, but again, even if you are in a marriage where you don't agree or you're divorced and you don't agree, the majority of the time what you're doing is you're just reacting to what the other person is doing. And that isn't setting you up for moving in the direction you wanna go. It's just you not moving in the direction that they are or getting bounced around. So it's understanding and becoming more and more aware, understanding what's happening in your body, in your mind, in your emotions, being able to connect all those things, learning to step into agency. What choices do I have? We only have three. The universe made it super simple for us because that's the way things work. And what are those choices? We can accept something, meaning accept it without resentment or bitterness and move on.

Mikki: If you can do that, fantastic. We don't need to talk anymore. The second one is, can you change it? Now, here's the trick. We can't change other people, but can I change something either within myself or the situation that would move it in a different direction? If you can do that and you want to, great do that. But then the third option is always on the table, and that's leave. And as a co-parenting coach, I do not mean divorce. What I mean is, do I need to leave the situation energetically, emotionally or physically? Because sometimes we can't change it, we can't accept it, so how am I going to leave it even if it's just energetically so that I'm not carrying this with me. So I think really learning how to use this framework and become more intentional, more aware, more conscious, helps us go in the direction that we wanna go.

Mikki: Right? It's like we can decide who do I wanna be? What does that safe, loving, sturdy parent look like for our children? If I know what I want it to look like, well now I have to reverse engineer all my actions to get there. And so that looks like when we don't agree with the other co-parent, some battles are worth fighting, others are not. Some we can't change at all. But yet, and that's one thing I see so often is it's like we get so mired down in this person is doing this thing and I can't stand, and it has to stop, but you have no control over it, but all of your energy is going there. Versus really wanting to learn how to reclaim your freedom, your emotional freedom, by learning how to unhook emotionally from what's going on, and really deciding how can I influence the situation?

Mikki: Everybody wants to be an influencer these days.

[laughter]

Mikki: So I say, be an influencer in your own family. Start to influence the direction of the emotions, the energetic and your actions to get you where you wanna go. And put your time and energy and love into that. And that to me creates a completely different environment, a completely different experience for your children and one that they will benefit from.

Kasia: Yeah, powerful, powerful. I'm wondering, do you have any strategies for unhooking, specifically?

Mikki: Mm-hmm.

Kasia: Mm-hmm.

Mikki: Unhooking? Oh, that's a good one. Yeah. Oh my gosh. I have to unhook 16 times a day.

Kasia: Daily.

Mikki: Just constantly unhooking, I mean, all the time. So here's the thing. The majority of us live from here up. This is where 99% of our time is spent in our head, but our bodies are actually here to help us navigate this entire process. All of our emotions live in our body, and emotions are not positive or negative. They're just different energetics in our body. It's energy in motion. And so when we start to understand, okay, when I tune into what's happening outside my head and in the vast majority of my body, now I have some opportunity to start to understand what's going on. Because our feelings and our emotions are just messengers telling us that something is either aligned or misaligned. So to be able to unhook, we have to start to have awareness around what's going on. When you get that pit in your stomach, when your shoulders tighten up and you feel like, oh, that instant sort of tightness, maybe it's that lump in your throat that you get every time you can't say something that you really wanna say. Maybe it's the fluttering in your chest. All of these things are not meant to hurt you. It's just your body's way of sending up a flag saying, Hey, we need some help here.

Mikki: So to be able to unhook, we have to first understand, I'm in reaction, I'm triggered. Most of us are used to finding out, we got triggered like three hours later and we're like, Ooh, what did I just do? Right? Oops, I didn't see that one coming. But if we're able to actually build the muscle of awareness, this doesn't happen overnight, but it's noticing even if my son always laughs at me, because I do this thing where as soon as I realize I'm triggered, and I might be mid yelling at him, and I try really hard every day, I'm like, I'm not yelling, I'm not gonna yell. But I've got a 13-year-old boy, which sometimes I'm just tearing my hair out. I don't understand him. He's like an alien. So I'll find myself either arguing with him or yelling or doing something, and I'll stop because I notice I've got that pit in my stomach. That's where I know my anxiety lives. So as soon as I notice it, then it sort of sends the trigger, oh, I'm triggered. And I'll even say, ha ha ha, ha, ha, I'm not. And he's like, oh gosh, she's doing the weird thing again. Right? It's like.

Mikki: I just name it. I'm like, Oh, I'm doing, I'm not doing it. I'm gonna, right. Or I do the really weird breathing thing, he says, where I start going shhh. And he's like, Oh gosh, the breathing thing, mom. I'm like, yep, the breathing thing. That's what's happening here. But just ways to acknowledge I'm triggered.

Kasia: Yeah.

Mikki: Right? And it can look on like putting your hand on your heart and taking a deep breath. It can be doing something silly like I do where I'm like, ha ha, you're not gonna get me this time. But just acknowledging I'm triggered right now and taking a moment to calm your nervous system, to take three deep breaths in through your nose, out through your mouth. If after three, you don't feel calmer, do it again, right? Because sometimes we're really triggered, but being able to calm yourself down, it's a muscle that we can build. And the more that we build that muscle, the quicker we have access to it, right?

Kasia: Yeah.

Mikki: So the idea isn't to never get triggered because you wouldn't be human, live unless maybe you're a monk sitting on a mountain top alone somewhere, right? We're going to get triggered. It's just, how can I become more aware of it? Understand what are the choices I have available? And then how do I wanna move forward from there in a direction that I wanna go? And so that to me is how we start to create more harmony inside of ourselves, more peace and calm inside, which then reflects on the outside into our home, into our parenting, into our relationships. But we have to be able to cultivate that calmness and that peace inside of ourselves. And that's the unhooking from the emotion 'cause otherwise you are hooked onto that emotional train and it is going to drag you right. A very far distance.

Kasia: Yeah.

Mikki: And so we have to learn how to just become aware of, I got triggered. I'm having a big emotion and learning how to process it because it's not the emotion that hurts. It's the try not to feel the emotion that hurts, right? Trying not to get drunk behind the train. No, you are. So let's go ahead and learn how to feel it so that we can do things differently.

Kasia: Yeah. Wow. That's so powerful. That's so powerful. And as you were talking about that, I'm like, okay, so like you said, it's a muscle we have to build with the awareness. And so maybe we don't wanna start practicing it like with kids. They're like Triggerville. But what are some places in our life that people can start building that awareness muscle? Because triggers are everywhere. I mean, even...

Mikki: Everywhere.

Kasia: Really. So where do you suggest people start practicing that? So when they get into those like bigger trigger situations that they can notice quicker?

Mikki: Yeah. So this is gonna be the answer that nobody likes. I'll just like spoiler alert, meditation and here. So I'm not saying that we all have to sit for hours and hours on end in silence because as moms, that's really hard to do. What I believe is really helpful is learning how to get out of our minds and into our body, right? It's setting aside the time to intentionally separate from the thoughts running in our head to becoming the witness of those thoughts, right? For me, the idea of meditation is simply to become more aware that my thoughts are outside of me. Because when I understand that they're outside of me and I'm actually the soul that witnesses them, I'm connecting into the divine, right? I'm connecting into the energy of the universe. And I realize now, okay, all the thoughts and things are outside of me, which means I have space, right? And so we get triggered when we think we are our thoughts, right? When we're just reacting to everything. So when we are able to sit in meditation for five minutes, 10 minutes, you can call it prayer. You can call it sitting in silence. You can call it whatever you want. I really don't care. But it's just building the muscle of to be able to be sitting in silence, concentrating on my breathing. I'm breathing, I'm breathing. Now I'm having a thought often about like hot dogs.

Mikki: I don't even eat hot dogs or like random things that I'm like, or what's on my to-do list for the day or what we're having for dinner. Clearly food's a big topic in my brain or what that person did that upset me. Any of these things that are going on. And I noticed the thought there, I was just successful in building the muscle. It's like doing reps at the gym. I noticed, oh, I got lost in thought. Okay, I'm gonna come back to my breath, right? And I'm gonna come back. Just doing that every day builds that muscle of being able to separate from our thoughts. And the more you do it, the more buffer you have. You might have one second. If you, I think that's, I think that's actually like really epic. If you have a second in between what's happening in the world and your reaction, that is enough time for you to not get triggered, right?

Mikki: But the only way that we extend that sort of buffer time in between us and the things happening is again, to be able to separate from our thoughts and be able to listen to what's going on in our bodies. And so it's just something that we have to sit down and we have to make time for. And I think one of the most profound things about really sitting, I've now meditated, I think I'm at like three and a half years. I've never missed a day. There are even surgery days, even like things happening. Sometimes it's five minutes. Sometimes it's 20 minutes. Sometimes it's twice a day, but I've never missed a day. And why I think this is important is because I simply made a promise to myself that you are worth five minutes. I start my day that way. And I think it's important to start your day because you're setting your day up with intention, with a message to yourself that says you are worth the time and the energy to build this muscle so that you can show up and live the life that you want.

Mikki: No one's gonna hand you that life. Nobody's gonna hand you the peaceful, calm home. No one is gonna hand you the family that you want. It's yours to go out and create. And we do that by taking care of ourselves on the inside and the outside.

Kasia: Oh, so good. So good. Keeping that promise like that is so perfect because that is so much in just in that statement. And like you're right, it shows us that we matter, that we're important, that we're worthy. And then it builds our confidence because we can count on our own self abandoning ourselves, as I often say. So how would since we're the true you show, what is your definition of authenticity?

Mikki: I think authenticity is simply being present to what is going on right now for you. Because we're constantly changing, we're constantly evolving, we're constantly learning, we're constantly making mistakes, right? We're supposed to do all of those things. But to be authentic is learning how to accept where you are, what's going on and having sort of the love and compassion and grace for yourself to move through it. And so I think authenticity is really just being present to what is going on and allowing yourself the space to learn and decide differently. It's like we're supposed to be learning and evolving. We're supposed to be growing. I mean, I tell my son all the time, you're supposed to make mistakes, right? This is how we learn. But when we do it from a place of shame and judgment, no one learns from that place versus being willing to say, I sort of am me, right?

Mikki: And I'm figuring it out and I'm flawed and I'm all the things, but I also am worthy and deserving and loved exactly as I am.

Kasia: Yeah, so good. So good. And I love how you said that, yes, we change, we're constantly evolving.

Mikki: Constantly.

Kasia: Not the same person I always say when I teach on relationships is like when we go into a conversation with our spouse or our child, we always assume we know them. We don't know them from day to day because they're also evolving and changing. So if we're not constantly in curiosity, we're missing this presence. What happened for you specifically, Mikki, through your journey and going through divorce? Like what pieces of you died? What pieces of you did you have to let go of to be the woman that you are today?

Mikki: Oh, my goodness. I feel like I'm still learning this lesson. So I'm gonna speak from what I know so far because it's still gonna keep going. But I really had to let go of being a complete perfectionist and control freak. I say that I'm a recovery perfectionist and an aspiring good enough nest. That's like a word I can't ever pronounce. But I really, I think, spent so much time in people pleasing in perfection in not understanding that the reason that we people please and the reason that we get stuck in perfection isn't because of how we want to be perceived. We're not like that methodical in our thinking. But it really is that we have an inability to be with the discomfort and the unease that we feel in our own bodies. So not being able to sit with the emotion makes us sort of react and control and people please. So for me, it's really been a journey of learning how to be with who I am, the perceived mistakes that I've made, the things that have been done to me and really deciding, do I want to live with all of that and carry all of that? Or do I wanna just move forward? And so it's that constant unhooking and letting go right of the past. And that's one thing I see with so many co-parents.

Mikki: And certainly I am raising my hand on this one. I believe that he's the exact same person that destroyed our marriage some days. I'm like, there he is. There he is. Like, I see you. So, but as long as I'm meeting him with that energy and that belief that he hasn't changed, I'm not opening up for anything. And so I really try to understand that people are essentially good. We have bad behavior. But if I can look at him as he's not the sum of the mistakes that he's made, I'm not the sum of the mistakes that I've made, nor is my son. And so learning how to be more open, more curious, less controlling, but most importantly, I've had to learn to really take care of myself in a different way. And that means learning how to be softer with myself, giving myself more grace and just more space to sort of show up in the world differently.

Kasia: Yeah. Powerful. Beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. So thank you so much, Mikki, for being with us. You're such a source of wisdom. Thank you for sharing your time and beautiful energy. And we, yeah, we'll see you soon, hopefully.

Mikki: Thank you so much. I'm really excited about being here and thank you for all you're doing and creating this amazing group.

Mikki: 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-parenting with Confidence.com. I'll see you next week.