THE MANAGED MINDSET
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional roller coaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 100.
Hello, my friends. I'm excited to bring you the final episode in this series on mindset traps that we fall into as moms in the empty nest straddle. That period of time, from what can be as early as the tween years through the time when our kids are out on their own, even beyond college.
My friends, the emptiness straddle is a long, winding road. And recently, I've been thinking about how we can make this time in our lives even harder than it has to be. I know it's been true in the past for me personally, and I see so many women struggling with this.
Look at any social media post or blog about raising teens, and we're all talking about the many challenges we face. Keeping our kids safe, dealing with them when they're not happy and acting in ways that we don't want, trying to help them be successful in life. Whether that means getting them into the college of their dreams, having a fulfilling social life, getting a job, finding love, or overcoming some big personal challenge.
Look, this is hard stuff. Important work. I don't mean to say that any of it isn't hard.
On top of this, we care so much about the outcome. We care so much about our kids. So it's not just a casual desire on our part when we think about how we want to support them.
It's our life's work. The most important work we feel we'll ever do. And I feel this way about my boys as well.
There's nothing in my life as precious or as meaningful as the privilege I've had of being the mom of these two young men. And I'll admit, I also want them to be safe. God, do I want them to be safe.
My youngest got his license earlier this month, and yes, for the first week or so, I was still double checking to make sure he was arriving at school safely and on time. I want my boys to be happy. I notice in myself a feeling of discomfort that comes up for me any time I think that my boys are unhappy.
I don't want anyone I love to be unhappy, but with my boys, the feeling is different. There's this pull of responsibility. For so long, it's felt like my job to keep them happy and taken care of.
So at this point, it's a something wrong. Same applies to wanting them to be successful. With big things and small things, I was so nervous the day my son went for his driver's test.
I noticed that I wanted him to be successful, mostly because I knew he would be pissed if he failed. Also, I already knew that in my mind, I'd take responsibility if he failed, because I think we should have spent more time practicing parallel parking with him. Happily, he passed, and all these concerns were averted.
But I noticed ahead of time that all of this was in my head, swirling around, creating my feelings of stress, worry, and responsibility. And this is small potatoes compared to the much bigger challenges our kids face as they grow up, that we face as we navigate this long period of transition and growth with our teens. So it is hard, but we make it harder than it has to be.
And here's how. We buy into the mindset traps. We experience emotions, we notice all of the thoughts running through our head, and we double down on it, using our feelings as evidence that there's a problem.
This is in fact one of the mindset traps I've covered in past episodes. The trap of emotional reasoning. You feel something and therefore you think that must mean those feelings are based on some objective reality.
For example, feeling anxious and then telling yourself, there's obviously something to fear because I feel anxious. Or thinking that person must have done something wrong because I feel angry. This trap is one of the foundational traps that we all, frankly, just get wrong.
So it's no surprise that I've included this particular trap in three of the four mindset trap types. And honestly, it could apply to all four. The mindset trap types I've covered so far are the worry mindset type, the fix-it mindset type, the validation-seeking mindset type, and the judgment mindset type.
And today I'm going to cover the managed mindset, really the goal of thought work. I thought this type would be helpful to include because honestly, it can be hard to envision what the point of mindset work really is. I mean, how do you even know if you're doing it right or whether it's worth the effort to learn enough about it to try? More and more you hear people talking about mindset work in lots of different ways.
You hear about mindfulness and manifestation, gratitude practice, being present, positive thinking, meditation. The goals of much of this work include finding compassion for ourselves, self-awareness, realizing our potential. As I took a step back and really thought about this list, to be honest, it all sounds like a bit of BS if we want to be really cynical about it.
Don't get me wrong, I am a huge believer in self-compassion. I love setting goals. I try to stay present in my life.
This work is worthwhile, there is no doubt. But as I think about how I want to share with you my view of what a managed mind really is, I don't know if these simple but frequently used phrases really cut it. Maybe it's because they capture only a fraction of the reality of life.
Being present. Have you ever tried to be present for a prolonged period of time? Even while meditating, it's almost impossible to stay present. I took a class on transcendental meditation a long time ago.
You may have heard of it because TM gained popularity when a bunch of celebrities started talking about this type of meditation. In TM, they teach a process where your mind and attention goes through cycles, different states of awareness or consciousness. In one of the videos I watched during the class, the instructor talked about your mind as a monkey mind that gets distracted from the work of meditation even while you're doing it.
One minute you're thinking about your mantra and the next minute you're thinking about your grocery list. Then five minutes after that you find you've drifted off to sleep. What I found really accessible about TM was that they say up front that your mind is going to wander.
And my mind definitely did. So I think it's why I found TM so powerful and have in fact continued to do it when I remember, I'll be honest. But the fact that they said your monkey mind is going to wander helped me see how I wasn't doing it wrong because five minutes in I was wondering how much longer I had to sit there or thinking about whether my son forgot his homework today or whatever my mind came up with.
Mindfulness, being present, even this feeling of peace we want so much more of. We know what it feels like when it happens but it can seem fleeting. It's so easy to get distracted or annoyed.
Something just comes up and once again you move from mindfulness to overwhelm, from being present to distracted, from peaceful to angry or anxious. You can't help but think that maybe you're doing it wrong if you can't keep this calm level of peace and presence. Even during happy times, holidays or times when your kid is home from college, vacations, you go into it telling yourself this time I really want to stay present.
And there's so much about the situation, if it's a generally happy occasion or activity, there's so much that would suggest that you should be happy but inevitably you get stressed about getting dinner on the table or your kid goes out with friends instead of hanging out with the family or there's something wrong with your hotel room or the flight's delayed. Life just happens and then we have feelings about it. Now if you've been here with me in the small jar for a minute you've heard me say probably quite a few times that the way you feel about anything is caused by the way you think about it.
So technically life happens, you have thoughts about what happened or is happening, and your thoughts, your perception of what that thing means for you or about you, these thoughts make you feel something. And so if you subscribe to the positive thinking theory, the key to feeling better about the situation is to change the way you think about it. And for me, I understand that this option is always available to me, to just think happier, more optimistic, positive thoughts about something.
But from my perspective that's not honest or I should say not genuine. Here's the thing, if you're really angry or anxious or sad about something, then telling yourself to reframe the situation so you feel better is basically telling yourself to just get over it. Honestly if it were that easy we'd all just be walking around thinking happy thoughts like a bunch of Stepford wives, everything is awesome.
I think this is where we can get stuck with this work. We feel better in the moment when we're doing something like yoga or meditation, we feel a bit of freeing of emotion, or we find these fleeting moments of peace in our daily life, or we do manage to gain a little perspective on the problem and we're able to take a deep breath and convince ourselves it's okay, but it doesn't last. We find ourselves stuck again, right back where we started from, anxious, frustrated, sad, overwhelmed.
Actually often we end up feeling worse because now we feel like we failed to feel better, like I can't even do that right. So let me paint a picture of what success looks like. What is a managed mind? The way I'll describe it to you is that you are in the driver's seat of your emotional life, but I want to be really clear up front, it does not mean that you're necessarily happy all of the time.
And as much as I think all of us might say that we would love to feel more happiness in our lives, we would probably all agree that we're not necessarily going for 100% happiness. I mean, let's face it, there are some parts of life that we don't want to be happy about. I don't want to be happy when someone I love is in pain.
When someone dies, you would never choose to be happy. Terrible, unthinkable things happen in the world. I can't be happy about any of them.
So there's this reality that even if you were forced to make a proactive choice about some of the things in your life, about how you want to think about them, you would choose to not feel happy about those things. I would even go so far as to say that life can be 50-50. 50% beautiful, happy, joyful, peaceful, content moments, and 50% boring, just blah, and even some difficult and really uncomfortable emotions.
That negative 50% includes everything from anxiety and anger to simple boredom or listlessness. While some of these emotions are really uncomfortable, others are just kind of blah. Not a big deal, but not great either.
Boredom is a perfect example of this. And it's interesting because many of us have never learned the skill of just allowing these emotions, letting ourselves feel them. And actually, let me clarify, you actually allow emotions all day long already.
You just don't know it or haven't thought about it this way. Very often when you feel happy or at peace, you welcome these emotions. You allow them to be there.
Because, well, of course, you love feeling this way, so of course you welcome these feelings with open arms. But notice how even these positive emotions, we can resist. Almost like, well, I'm happy right now, but I know it's fleeting.
I know something's going to happen that will bring the anxiety right back. You brace yourself. And even as you're experiencing these positive emotions, you're starting to let in other emotions like dread or anxiety in anticipation of the negative feelings coming back.
Can you think of a time when you've done this? I'll give you an example in my own life. When my son recently got his license, he was so proud of himself. We went to lunch for his birthday and he was beaming.
A whole new world had opened up to him. I was happy and honestly relieved that he had passed. But creeping into my happiness was already the dread of anticipation for every night that he would go out and I would worry about him being safe.
At least until I got used to it. That moment of happiness for my son was dampened ever so slightly by what I knew was coming. If I'm honest, it was also dampened by a twinge of sadness that we wouldn't be spending any more time together in the car.
A chapter was closing. It's a perfect example of how every moment is colored by a myriad of emotions. Some positive, some negative.
Again, that 50-50. Some emotions are easier to allow than others. And as we've been discussing over the past few months in this series on Mindset Traps, our subconscious primitive mind is looking for danger, trying to find comfort, wanting to simplify, to understand, and to be able to predict.
And so when we're faced with these moments where we have a series of thoughts, some that cause positive emotions and others that cause emotional pain, our minds will tend to latch on to those negative emotions as a problem, a threat to our safety and comfort. As I've said so many times throughout this series, this isn't a sign that there's something wrong with you. This is a sign that your mind is working exactly as it's meant to work.
When we feel really painful emotions, like anxiety, we don't want to feel this way, and so we immediately go into resistance mode. It's like we mentally wage war against our emotions. And because we don't want to feel this way, we look for a way out, either by blaming someone else or our life in general, or by blaming ourselves and all of the things that are wrong about us, or things that we've done to deserve whatever emotion we're having.
When we find ourselves in this place, we often start to experience our life as if the negative emotions or the negative aspects of our life become so much bigger, a net negative experience where the pain outweighs the joy. Since we can't control others and we can't figure out how to fix ourselves right away, so many of us end up looking for some kind of parachute, antidepressants, HRT, therapy. Please, someone give me some solutions so that I can find some relief from this emotional pain.
But what I want to offer you is a different path. The managed mind. As I said earlier, the journey of mindset work really can't start with just changing your mindset, with just forcibly latching on to better thoughts.
Because look, the thoughts you have that are creating the pain are still there. So the path to developing a managed mind, where you are in the driver's seat of your emotional life, is that you have to understand why you perceive your life the way that you do. Often the way you do this in therapy is that you explore the cause of your perspective based on how you were raised or past trauma you may have experienced.
It's certainly not wrong to go through this exercise. I think particularly if you've had a past experience that you haven't healed from, this exploration can be really powerful. But depending on your therapist, I think sometimes what's lost in that conversation is, okay, now I understand my past.
I understand my upbringing. I understand that all may have contributed to who I am now and how I'm experiencing my life. But what's often not clear is now what? It honestly makes me sad when women come to me after having been to therapy and they tell me about who they are as if that is a fixed concept, that this is who I am and I just have to accept that this is true about me.
Here's what's wrong with this, in my mind. If you decide you're an anxious person or someone who is controlling or someone who seeks validation, and you now believe that this is an unchangeable facet of who you are, then guess what? That is who you'll be. But the question I want to ask you, the belief I want to challenge is, why do you think that that's something about yourself that you don't have the power to change? The journey I take my clients through is a process of observing your mind as if you're a third-party, impartial observer.
You witness the thoughts you have about your life and you notice. You begin to start noticing thoughts about those thoughts. You're already doing this, by the way.
You just don't know that you're doing it. It's a fascinating exercise to learn how to take a conscious step back from your mind and observe and then ask questions. Why am I thinking that? Not in a judgmental, I shouldn't be thinking this kind of way, and not even in a, what happened in my past that's causing me to think of this kind of way.
The question is quite literally, why am I choosing to think this thought right now? Even in this question, there's agency. There's the possibility that the thought or the series of thoughts that you're having right now is, in fact, a choice you're making. For example, maybe we think badly about ourselves because an ex-husband used to put us down, but that doesn't answer the question, why are you choosing to believe there's something wrong with you right now in this moment? Why are you choosing to believe that ex was right? In contrast to therapy, and not all therapy is like this, but I've found often this is where many women end up.
When we learn that something in our past caused our patterns of thinking and emotional experience, we fall into a sort of powerlessness, like this is just who I am. In contrast, consider the power of challenging the thoughts you're having, even getting curious about the emotions you're having, from the perspective that all of it is ultimately a choice. And I don't mean to say that it's a choice that you're making that's wrong.
What's actually happening is that you're unconsciously choosing a series of thoughts that are driving the way you feel. So fascinating, this line of inquiry begins to bring the subconscious to the conscious. We start to articulate thoughts about our life that have been driving the way we feel, that we didn't even realize that we were thinking.
If you've been listening for a while, you've heard me talk about how we think that it's the circumstances of our lives or other people that make us feel what we're feeling. And this truly is because we're not consciously aware of the thoughts that we're having about those circumstances and those people. Those subconscious thoughts are automatic, triggered by the mindset traps we're exploring.
By this base instinct, the motivational triad, our desire to avoid danger, seek pleasure, and make our lives simple. For me as a master coach, the fascinating role I get to play is to ask my clients the questions that empower them to explore these subconscious thoughts, to bring them to light and understand how they are driving their experience right now. And most importantly, to empower them to consciously decide how to move forward.
I'll tell you a story about how this process has worked in my life. I started discovering thought work when my kids were still pretty young. At the time, I thought of myself as this type A person, very driven, some control issues in terms of wanting my life to be a certain way.
In many ways, I've thought about this aspect of my personality as a real benefit because it's helped me be successful. It's helped me achieve some really great things in my life, including helping me get my act together as a mom, keeping my boys on schedule, managing the craziness of our lives and our home, while volunteering and working full-time. I honestly developed such a sense of validation in my mind from these things.
But the flip side was that when things didn't go the way I wanted them to go, I would feel incredibly frustrated. I felt overwhelmed almost all of the time. I'm so busy was like a mantra for me.
It just never felt like I could get ahead of what was happening in my life, no matter what I did. I felt like it was never enough, that I was never enough. And it didn't seem like an option for me to cut back on my commitments and obligations just because it was those very same commitments, including being a mother.
All of these things were fueling my sense of validation. And keep in mind, this was before my kids were teenagers. I still had a reasonable amount of control over their lives.
And you can already see the writing on the wall in terms of what was coming for me as a controlling person as my boys grew up. So given the craziness of my life, I developed a habit really early on. In fact, this habit was born even before I became a mom.
The way I let myself off the hook after a long day was to pour a glass of wine, or two, sometimes three. I would never get drunk or sloppy. This was never something that my husband or anyone else felt the need to point out to me as a problem.
But as the years went on, I started thinking it was a problem. Most significantly, it was a problem because I found when I got to the end of the day, any day, it was really hard for me to not pour that glass of wine. Despite all of this, I really didn't identify as an alcoholic.
But I was experiencing an increasing unease with the choices I was making. Honestly, the lack of control I felt I had about the choices I was making. And a growing secret shame, to be honest, that I didn't have control over my own behavior.
So I discovered a coaching program that ignited the spark for me in terms of understanding that my drinking wasn't actually the problem. My drinking was actually a solution for me. It was a parachute, my escape valve, that I'd come to rely on because I hadn't learned how to manage my mind.
Look, the way we feel, the way we behave or show up in our lives, the results we create in our lives, all of it stems from our mindset, the way we perceive our lives. Women come to me for coaching and they'll tell me that they're struggling with anxiety, sadness, anger, or guilt around something to do with their teens. Or as they work through the transition to the next chapter of their lives, they feel terrible.
They feel disconnected from their teens. They feel a loss of purpose. They worry they're being controlling, don't know how to set boundaries, don't know how to support their teen, don't know how to let go of this precious relationship they've had.
They feel they've lost themselves, don't know where to start in terms of setting goals. These are just a few examples of the challenges that women have when they come to me. They see a different version of their life, but they don't know how to get there.
The problems women come to me with, the negative emotions, the inability to move forward, all of these are symptoms of a mindset problem. And when I say problem, I want to be clear it's not an indication that there's something wrong with these women. Our minds are incredibly powerful tools.
They create our emotions, our behavior, and every result we get in our life over which we have control. So when you're not supervising your mind, when you're not aware of your subconscious thoughts, not proactive in choosing on purpose the thoughts you want to believe, then you're going to default to the results you create from these mindset traps driven by your basic need for safety and comfort. Just think about the additional negativity you layer onto yourself when your subconscious mind is in charge, when you're falling prey to these mindset traps.
And then on top of that, you beat yourself up for it, whether it's drinking too much or feeling stuck in anxiety or not being able to let go or move on. Rather than judging yourself for it, consider that all of this is simply the result of how your mind is processing your life in a well-intentioned effort to keep you safe and comfortable. Once I understood and honestly gained compassion for how I was simply using alcohol to feel better about my life, I started asking the more important questions.
Why do I need to feel better about my life? Why am I letting myself get so overwhelmed? Why is it hard to give myself permission to let myself off the hook? I learned so much about myself through this process, a journey that continues to this day. Being in the driver's seat of your emotional life, having a managed mind, means having the ability to observe and be curious about your subconscious mind, even having compassion for your subconscious mind. And in those moments when your primitive brain decides to have a tantrum about your life, you're in a position to supervise those thoughts.
Very similar to how on our good days, we dealt with our toddlers when they were having meltdowns. Yes, honey, I get it. You want the cookie, but you're not going to have it right now.
I love you, but no. Or when our kids were hurt, we would say, I know it hurts, honey. It's okay to be sad.
In all of the ways you've showed up for your children through the ups and downs of their emotions, with love and compassion, understanding that sometimes they had to experience difficult emotions, you can bring that same level of love, compassion, and supervision to your own mind. And again, this doesn't mean that you choose to feel happy all of the time, but it does mean that you observe when you're creating unnecessary pain. It means you can decide on purpose how you want to show up, rather than reacting to your emotions on autopilot.
It means you can decide what you have control over and what you don't, always knowing that what you do have control over is how you behave. You have control over your own decisions, even over how you think about your life. This is a skill set that you have the power right now to develop, only no one has ever taught you how to do it.
And this is exactly what I teach in my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0. This is the impact having a managed mind has had in my life. I rarely drink alcohol. I never drink to feel better or to create emotion.
I can take it or leave it because I know the alcohol never makes me feel better or helps me create emotion. My relationship with my teen sons is stronger than it's ever been, and we've been through some incredibly challenging times. But now that I have compassion for my basic need for control, I'm able to choose to let it go.
In the process, I've experienced the gift of being able to watch my sons step into who they are, appreciating how much they don't need me anymore, but also honoring my sadness in the process of letting that chapter of my life go. I've come to understand how it was never being a mother or my accomplishments that gave me validation, but rather the way I was thinking about all of those things. I'm now empowered to create that feeling for myself whether I do everything on my list or frankly decide to do nothing at all.
I'm in charge of deciding what's enough. I'm the one who decides what creates purpose in my life. Having a managed mind means that I get to create these positive feelings for myself, and I'm not dependent on life going my way for this to happen.
I've developed a deep trust in myself that I can handle the ups and downs of my life. The truth is life will keep happening. There will be times ahead of all of us that we must experience pain, grief, and disappointment.
I know that whatever lies ahead for me, I have the ability to be the observer of my mind, to stand back and supervise, decide how I want to approach my life, the decisions I make next. The tangible impact of a managed mind is that you gain the confidence to take on any challenge. For me, that started with no longer drinking, but it's expanded to losing weight, getting fit, managing my time, being sure to carve out plenty of time for things I love, all while growing a coaching business and working full-time.
Each new goal has given me an opportunity to practice believing in myself, believing that I am enough. I've learned how to create feelings like confidence and motivation while allowing feelings like fear, insecurity, doubt, and disappointment, the 50-50 of life, but in an entirely new level, one where I am propelling myself forward rather than keeping myself stuck. Here's the impact of a managed mind from the perspective of a few of my clients.
One of them said, I gained confidence and trust in myself as a parent and learned to accept my son for exactly who he is. Rather than spending time and energy worrying about him and our relationship or dreading my future without him in my daily life, I'm embracing the time we spend together and planning for my future with all its possibilities. Another client shared, Jennifer opened a window for me to step out of the vortex and create space in my life for so many possibilities, including joy, strength, and purpose.
The sense of freedom I have from not being controlled by life's circumstances and the emotions of raising teenagers is hard to describe. A managed mind is being in the driver's seat of your emotional life, my friend, and when you learn how to both allow and harness emotions to navigate your life, a whole new world of possibility opens up to you. You may just have to experience it yourself.
I've just opened additional spots for coaching, so join me in Mom 2.0. You have more power than you think you do, my friend. Until next time. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0, at www.thesmalljar.com.
You have more power than you think, my friend.
