Ep #4: What Choice Do I Have?

I’m Mikki Gardner, and this is the Co-Parenting with Confidence podcast, episode number four, What Choice Do I have? In this episode, we’re going to talk all about choices: how to recognize choices and how to make choices. So, let’s dive in. 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, friends. I’m so glad to be back here with you. Today, we are going to talk all about choices. So, this is one of my favorite topics. And I know I’ve said that before already, but there’s a lot of favorite topics, but this one in particular, because this one is all about empowering ourselves to show up as the mom that we want to be. And so, what I want to talk about, again, is choices. How often have you heard yourself say, “But I had no choice. I had to” or “He left me no choice” or “I have to do it.” Any of these little sentences are really actually quite impactful in our life. Clients will tell me, “I can’t be the mom that I want to be because of the situation or my divorce or two houses.” Or “I have to respond to those nasty texts I get.” Or they feel at the mercy of their kids’ schedules or their own schedule or at the mercy of the situation. But here’s the thing: we always have a choice. Why? Because we’re humans and we have free will. It was just the gift that we were given, and we all have more agency in our lives than we tell ourselves. And when we’re constantly telling ourselves that we don’t have a choice—that we have to—well, frankly, we’re just lying to ourselves because we’re negating the free will and the agency that we have. As kids, we have less agency. But as adults, we have a whole lot more. But sometimes we’re acting like we haven’t gotten any extra agency in our life and that other people are in control of our lives. Because when we’re kids, we are obligated to sort of the situation. We only have limited choices, and we’re dependent on other people to give us what we need. But as adults, we have a choice. But when we tell ourselves that we don’t, we’re lying to ourselves, we’re limiting our options, and we’re frankly keeping ourselves stuck and in victimhood. So, our primitive brain—there are two parts of the brain, and we’ll go into this further in other episodes, but it’s important to understand here that we have two parts of our brain: a primitive brain and then our higher brain. And so, in the primitive brain, we have three choices ever: fight, flight, or freeze. So, when our “animal brain,” so to speak, is in control, those are pretty much the choices. Now, we as humans are the only species on the earth that have an amazing part of our brain called the prefrontal cortex. This is where all of our emotions, our logic, and our reasoning reside. This is where possibility and choice reside as well. But, even with the prefrontal cortex, we’re kind of given only a few options. So, with the prefrontal cortex, we have three choices, again, kind of in any given situation. We can accept, we can change, or we can leave. So, I’m gonna go through each of them here. So, acceptance—a lot of people think that when I say “acceptance,” that what I’m talking about is condoning or agreeing with. Could not be further from the truth. What I’m talking about when I saw “accept” a situation, it really means kind of dropping the rope. It’s about not having resistance to what is. There is an “as is”-ness of life. It’s just kind of the facts. It’s the situation. It’s the circumstance. It’s the facts of the matter. So, when we are resisting this, we are not in a state of acceptance. When we can accept—we may not like something, but we can sort of accept it without fighting against it—that is acceptance. So, that’s one of our choices and options. The second is to change, and this is where we spend a lot of our time: trying to change other people, change circumstances, change ourselves. Any of those things. But here’s the thing: we cannot change other people. I know that I would love it if we could—it would be awesome—but, unfortunately, we can’t. Why? Because they also have free will. They have the agency to do what they’re gonna do. And, unfortunately, the more we try to make people change, the less they like it. And it creates even more problems for us. We also can’t change circumstances. There are things outside of us that we just cannot change: Mother Nature, our age, where we were born—all of those things. Those are just things that happen that we cannot change. What we can change—what we have complete control over—is ourselves. And how do we have this? I know we’ve talked about this on the first few episodes, but we always have control over how we’re thinking. What we believe. This is huge, because it is what we’re thinking or believing that creates the feelings that we’re having. And the reason that we do anything in our life is because of how we’re feeling. So, you can see that when we want to have more control over our life, we have to start with our thoughts and our feelings. So, that’s change. So, we have accept, change, and then the last one is to leave. There are times that we cannot change a situation, other people, and we just can’t go on with that. Or we cannot accept. There are times that things are going on that are outside of what we find acceptable or are not in line with our values. This could be someone treating you really, really poorly. This could be abuse. This could be a number of different things that just are not okay, and then leaving is the option—is the choice available. Now, that could be meaning leaving a relationship, a situation, an argument, a place—kind of any of those things. And there are different ways of leaving. Do we leave physically? Do we kind of leave emotionally? Or do we leave mentally, kind of setting things aside? There are complexities and there’s sort of gray here, but those are really the three options: to accept and drop the resistance of – drop the fighting of – to change, or to leave. So, when we really boil it down to what our choices are, we can see that we always have choices. And so, this is where we are empowered. And listen, I’m not gonna tell you that you should love all the choices that you have. But what I do want to help you understand is that we can start to make choices to step into our agency—to exercise our choices consciously, so that we can become aware of those choices; we can start using our higher brain, not our animal brain; and we can then stop living on autopilot. I mean, the fact of the matter is is that when we tell ourselves that we have no choice, we’re just lying. We’re keeping ourself victimized and we’re victimizing ourself. And then we end up living—I refer to it as “pinball mode.” We’re just bouncing from thing to thing to thing. And other people are dictating the way that we show up. This isn’t living authentically and intentionally. This is just living in a response pattern—reacting to life. When we do understand, recognize, and start to make choices, we are taking responsibility for ourself. We are taking ownership over our life. We are opening up to possibility. And when we are exercising these choices, we’re telling ourselves the truth. We’re no longer lying to ourselves, but we’re telling ourself the truth. And you know what happens then? The more we tell ourselves the truth, even when it’s hard and we show up, we start to have more confidence. And then as we have more confidence, we trust ourselves more. And this is a powerful place to be. And when I talk about this, I am really not talking about trying to positively think our way out of a situation we don’t like. It’s just about refusing to lie to ourselves anymore. It’s recognizing what is available, what agency we do have, and then exercising that. It’s about taking responsibility for our life instead of blaming others for what’s going on. It’s about taking action to show up as the mom you truly want to be, no matter what any of the other people are doing or saying. It is possible. I’m also not saying it’s easy. It’s simple to give ourselves the choices, but it’s not easy to do. So, I’m going to go back to a couple of those examples where we tell ourselves we have no choice so that we can kind of go through it a little bit more. A lot of times, I have clients who will tell me they can’t be the mom that they want to be because the other house has rules that they don’t have in their house. But when we boil this down and really get to the heart of it, it’s that we’re afraid of something. We’re afraid of not having control. If we don’t have complete control—if we’re not around all the time—we don’t know what’s going on, and therefore, we’re not able to show up the way that we want to. But it’s not the two houses or the one house or the five houses or whatever that’s creating your control. Regardless of how many houses there are, your control is always really only over yourself, as we talked about before. And so, we might be afraid of what’s missing. We might be in scarcity of what we don’t have. But when we are stuck there, what we’re not doing is concentrating and focusing on what we do have, which is control over ourselves and choosing how we want to show up. You know, you do get to choose the rules in your house. You might not get to choose them everywhere, but you do get to set the tone, set the rules, say what’s okay and what’s not okay. And you get to enforce that. And you get to choose how you’re going to do that. You also get to choose how you’re going to talk to yourself and what you’re going to believe about how you’re showing up as a mom. I see this with my clients all the time. And they feel like they have to keep their kids busy to keep them happy—that they have to do all the things to be a good mom. And essentially, trying to make up for the guilt maybe of the divorce by trying to give them more or add more to their life. But sometimes, more isn’t always best. And so, when we start to recognize the choices that we have, we can start to understand, “Do I have to do this, or am I choosing to do it?” Just that differentiation versus saying, “I have to take my kids here. I have to do all these things,” versus, “I want to take them. I want to choose this.” That little differentiation and that little switch in vocabulary words is so powerful. And so, I’m gonna say one other thing about this. A lot of times when maybe our situation changes… We may have been a stay-at-home mom and then we need to go back to work, and sometimes we can feel really resentful—blame the ex for the divorce, for us having to work. You know, I’ve seen this with clients before where they are really, frankly, very upset and resentful that they’re now working. “I have to do it. I have to step up and get a job.” Well, that “have to,” again, keeps them stuck in frustration, in past thinking, in all of the resentment, versus choosing to say, “I want to work. I want to provide for my kids. I want to do this.” It may not be first choice, but it’s understanding that you are making the choice to do it. You’re not being forced. Frankly, you could stay in bed and not get out of bed. We’re choosing to show up in life. And so, just kind of admitting to ourselves that we have a choice and that we’re utilizing it is really the first step to kind of awareness of choices. So, another thing that I see so, so often is when we’re in high conflict. When we’re in a high-conflict situation with maybe an ex. And I hear all the time, “Well, he sent me a note, and I had to respond.” We feel like that nastygram, as I like to call them, as soon as it hits our phone, boom. We have to react. We have to respond. We can’t let him get the last word. “I have to.” Sound familiar at all? I think we’ve all been there. But here’s the thing: we have a choice. We get to choose how we show up. We get to choose if we react or if we are going to consciously respond. And if we’re going to accept, change, or leave the situation. It’s just a matter of learning how to take a breath, creating a little bit of space, so that we can choose what we want to do instead of constantly be reacting. And so, as always, I want to be able to give you tangible ways to start to recognize choice in your life today. So, one of them is a 24-hour role. So, what I’m going to offer here is, whenever we find ourselves feeling like we have no choice… Let’s say we have to make a decision about something, or somebody asks us for something, and we’re feeling kind of pulled and obligated, but we have that pit in our stomach. I want you to offer yourself some space. And we can say, “You know what? I’m not quite sure about that. I will get back to you.” Or, if your kids want something, “I can’t do that now, but I’ll let you know in 24 hours.” If your ex needs something and asks to change the schedule or whatever, you can say, “You know what? I’ll get back to you in 24 hours. I need to think about it.” The only thing this does—or the amazing thing that this does—is offers you some space to, instead of making a rash decision or feeling “I have to,” rushing in, and just reacting, it gives you the space to think about it. It gives you the space to decide. And then you can take some time to get quiet, to be still, and to ask yourself, “What is that I want here? What do I believe is the next right decision?” And then go there. The second thing that I want to offer you is sort of curious thinking. So, I just finished reading a book. It was called Happy Not Perfect by Poppy Jamie. It’s a great book. And she talks a lot about flexible thinking. And I love this concept. I’ve used curiosity in my life for the past many years, and it’s really—what it does is open you up to possibility. And that’s a lot of what Poppy is saying, is that we need to figure out how to be more flexible—to have a mindset of flexibility. Because when we tell ourselves we have no choice, we’re locked into this or that, right or wrong, good, or bad, this choice or that choice. And so, what we want to do is start to be able to open up to find other options, to find other things available to us, not just kind of listen to our gut response there. I’m not saying don’t listen to your gut. But it’s like, we don’t necessarily have to go with the first thing we think. And so, to do this, there are two ways. She suggests that you pick sort of a flexible thinking mentor—somebody that you really admire, who you think makes really good decisions, is showing up in their life the way that you want to be showing up in yours. Maybe that’s somebody like another mom in a similar situation that you’re like, “man, she really has that together.” Maybe it’s your favorite movie character, someone who’s totally on top of it, like Wonder Woman kind of person. Maybe it’s Oprah. Really just run-of-the-mill, but extraordinary at the same time. Whoever it is, you ask yourself, “What would they think here? What do I think they would do in this situation?” Because what it’s doing is it’s just opening ourselves up to another way of seeing it. As soon as we get out of thinking that it’s one way and we start to open our brain and start to ask it questions and ask it to look for other options, it’s going to go to work finding it. The second thing, and the one that I really love, is a sort of mantra or affirmation that I’ve used for basically all of this year. But the idea that “I am willing to see this differently.” Just when I say that, it kind of opens up possibility. When a situation comes up that I’m feeling obligated, that I’m feeling stuck in, when I’m telling myself I have no choice, I have to say, “I am willing to see this differently. If I were willing to see this differently, what would be available?” And just allow myself the space to kind of daydream or journal on it or look for ways to see it differently. Because my brain is going to respond and find options. So, these are just two tangible ways that you can start to use flexible thinking and getting a little bit more curious and giving yourself a response time. Like, a timeout to find options available instead of just going with what you think you have to go with. And I’m going to tell you a story from my own personal life about this. When I was right at the beginning of the separation in my marriage, I was watching Brené Brown’s TED Talk. If you have not seen it, please immediately go and see it. It’s extraordinary. But in there, there was an image of a woman that had “I am enough” written on her chest in Sharpie marker. And when I saw it, I laughed out loud. I was all alone, and I had an audible kind of laugh. Like, “Hah. No way.” And I thought to myself, “Nobody thinks that.” It wasn’t even an option in my head. And I couldn’t sleep that night, and I remember laying in bed, and at one point I thought, “Could she really think that? Are there women that think that they are enough?” And it got me thinking—it got me wondering—like, “If they think that, why do they get to think that? Could I think that? Is that an option for me?” And the moment that I started to kind of get curious and open up to it and I saw my resistance to it, I started to play around with it. It is now my mantra because I know that when I am feeling stuck, when I am telling myself I have no choice, when I am feeling frustrated, it’s because I’m feeling like I am not good enough, that I am lacking, that I am not showing up in some way. And so, for me to come back to just the belief and the knowledge that I know that I am 100% worthy, loved, and enough exactly as I am, it took me a while to go down that journey to believe that, but it’s been the most empowering journey I’ve been on. And so, I just wanted to kind of throw it out there, because I know in my heart that you—and I’m speaking directly to you—that you are 100% enough. That you are 100% worthy. And you are 100% capable of creating the life that you are wanting. But we have to start by being willing to tell ourselves the truth, to challenge our “have to” beliefs, and to start to recognize what choices we have and start taking responsibility. Start making choices that are good for us. Start telling ourselves the truth and taking ownership over our life. And it all begins with a very simple willingness to choose what you want to do. To start to ask yourself, “What choices do I have?” And then, “Which ones do I want to take?” And every time you hear “I have to” or “I have no choice,” I want you to stop yourself in your tracks, put your hand on your heart, and say, “I do have choice because I have free will, because I am human, and because I can do this.” So, that’s what I have for you today. I would love to hear from you and how this is working in your life. But before we leave, I have a little favor to ask. To celebrate the launch of the show, I’m going to be giving away $75 gift cards to Amazon to three lucky listeners who follow, rate, and review the show. I want to give you something to brighten your day, like subscribing and reviewing to this podcast brightens mine. Listen, it doesn’t have to be a five-star review, although I sure would love if you’re enjoying the show. But I want your honest feedback so that I can create an awesome show that provides you a ton of value. So, please visit CoParentingwithConfidence.com/PodcastLaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I’m going to be announcing the winners on an upcoming episode. Thank you so much for spending time with me. I know there are a million things you could be doing, and I am so grateful that you’ve chosen to be here with me. So, take care of yourself and I’ll see you next week. 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.