TRUSTING YOURSELF TO MOVE FORWARD
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 106.
Hello, my friends. Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast. There are so many of you who have been loyal listeners for some time, but there are many more new friends who have just recently started listening, so I thought I'd take a moment to take a step back and share my perspective on the purpose of this podcast and my work as a master coach, and to tell you a bit more about me and how I got here.
So often women will ask me, where should I start with this podcast? So I mean for this episode to be a bit of an insider's guide into how to get the most out of this podcast and the other free resources I have for you in the small jar. Let me start off by sharing who this podcast is for. Although all are welcome here, this is who I have in mind when I'm creating all of my work.
I'm speaking to you if you're a mom whose kids are growing up and you're navigating the road to the empty nest. This isn't one point in time, but a journey where you're constantly navigating the push and pull of supporting your teen's safety, happiness, and success, and the reality that at some point they're going to have to do all of this on their own. A big part of this journey is also the reality that you are someone separate from your role as a mom.
It starts with you noticing that your kids spend more time with friends or closed up in their room. You have more time on your hands, even if that means the amount of time you spend thinking about and supporting your kids doesn't change. You are a mom and also a woman who will send your kids off into the world, who maybe has already sent her kids off to college and beyond.
And then you are left. Who do you want to be when that happens? Who are you right now? Although I talk a lot about life with teens because that's honestly a big and important part of our lives, this is not a podcast about how to parent. In fact, I'm very clear with my clients and throughout each episode that I will never tell you what you should be doing as a parent.
Each of us have our own values and relationship with our kids. I believe you know exactly how you want to parent. The challenge is trusting yourself to show up as the mom you want to be.
Now, creating trust in yourself is really the cornerstone of all of the work that I do with my clients. I empower moms to trust themselves to decide they have the ability to create peace and confidence in their life, to be the parent and the woman they want to be, and to redefine their purpose as they approach the empty nest. I sum these up as three P's, peace, parenting, and purpose.
Let's start with the first one, creating peace. Life with teens and the transition to the empty nest is an emotional roller coaster for all of us in different ways. Some of us struggle with anxiety, some frustration and anger, others of us guilt or sadness or dread, overwhelm.
It's a cruel joke that the challenges of raising teens coincides with perimenopause. This job of being a mom is hard enough without our hormones going haywire. And look, that's not all that's going on in our lives.
We have other relationships with our spouse, other family members and friends. We deal with health challenges or financial challenges. Life can be a lot.
So the first challenge I'd look to help moms with is to help them feel not so at the mercy of their emotional life. The truth is, at times, life can be filled with so much love and joy, gratitude. There really are so many beautiful, powerful emotions that come with seeing our kids grow into who they're meant to be.
No matter who your child is and what challenges they're going through, you love this beautiful human. But then there's the other side of the coin, what I often refer to as the negative 50%. It's the anxiety of seeing your child take risks, go through heartache and struggle to be successful.
It's a frustration of wanting to guide them and them pushing away your support and advice. It's the hurt and sadness of becoming what we might perceive to be a less important part of their life. Alongside the love and the gratitude, we experience a whole host of other, more painful emotions.
And it's not only uncomfortable to be in this place, but then we start to judge ourselves. We think we can't handle the anxiety. We also sometimes react to our feelings in ways that leave us feeling guilty or even ashamed.
We can worry that the way we're showing up is causing even more disconnection with our kids. There's so much here, and so in all of my work, this is one area where I look to help you step off this rollercoaster of emotion. To find peace and confidence to trust yourself, to be able to handle what's in front of you, even when you can't immediately change what's going on with your teen or in your life.
The second P is parenting, or really being the mom you want to be for your kids. Again, this isn't the specifics of how to parent. It's about having the confidence and ability to understand and have compassion for your own emotions so that you can show up in exactly the way you know you want to show up for your teen.
Set boundaries and enforce consequences when necessary. Know how much to step in, how much to support, when it's time to trust your teen, and when it's time to get involved. There are no hard and fast rules that apply universally to all of our kids.
You know your child. You know your values. But there are times when navigating this ever-changing dynamic of support and independence is incredibly challenging.
Throughout our kids' lives, we've had to learn and adjust to their changing needs. You're never really prepared for that next phase of parenting until it hits you, and then you work your way through it the best you can. You've actually been doing this since your kid was a baby.
But now that they're a teen, it feels so much more difficult. In my work, I talk about this as the emptiness straddle. It's being caught between feeling responsible to help our kids be safe, happy, and successful, and ultimately realizing that we have no control over this.
I often say that for 19 years now, it's been my job to keep my boys safe, help them be happy and successful. It honestly feels like this is my job as a mom. And the challenging thing is that when our kids were little, it actually felt like we had some control over those things.
But once our kids become teens, at some point, we moms start to feel powerless to help our kids be safe, happy, and successful. And this is a scary place to be. What I've discovered in my work with so many moms is that the challenge we face in actually being the mom we want to be is that we often parent from those feelings of anxiety and frustration rather than confidence and peace.
And look, I'll be the first to admit, I've had my fair share of anxiety and frustration with my boys. I think these feelings are perfectly understandable. But when I parent from anxiety, make decisions and communicate with my boys from that feeling of anxiety or frustration, I show up in ways that I regret, or at very least in ways that aren't particularly effective.
So the opportunity here is to learn how to intentionally parent from a place of peace and confidence. You do this by creating compassion for where you are in the empty nest straddle, how you view your responsibility and purpose as a mom relative to your child's need for independence. There is no one right answer here.
More than anything, this is a journey of self-discovery, the opportunity to create a deep awareness about who you are as a mom, and also lean into that even as you empower your teen to take flight. The third and last P is purpose. I know from personal experience how all-consuming the job of raising kids and teens is.
It's like you don't know where your kids end and you as a separate person begins. This can be just as true for women who work outside of the home while raising their kids as it can be for the women who work inside the home raising their kids. Our kids are our priorities.
And quite often, you don't have the emotional energy to worry about what you need or want. To be honest, sometimes you don't even want to ask the question, am I happy? Our kids give structure and meaning to our lives. And although the meaning and love they've created for us will never go away, the reality is that once they leave home, we have quite a bit more time on our hands.
Some women view this as an opportunity to focus on themselves and their needs for a change, and others of us feel a sense of loss or dread. Or maybe even just a sense of overwhelming confusion like, I have absolutely no idea what's next for me and I don't even know where to start. No matter whether you view this transition as a good or a bad thing, it can still be difficult to decide what comes next.
Maybe you want to get a job or switch careers. Maybe you want to meet new friends or find a new love relationship. Maybe you're going through a painful divorce.
The bottom line is that many of us have focused on the dreams of our kids and families for so long that we've forgotten to invest time or thought into our own dreams. The question here really is, who do you want to be in your next chapter? What kind of life do you want to live? What will make you happy? How do you begin to trust yourself to make these decisions? You'll notice that these three Ps, peace, parenting, and now the third purpose, are really intertwined. In order to create more peace and productive, positive emotion in your life, to be the mom you want to be, and ultimately to be the woman you want to be in your next chapter, it all comes down to developing a deeper relationship with yourself.
And this isn't at all about exploring your past so that you can understand where and who you are. This is about creating compassion for where you are now and trusting yourself to move forward. It's ultimately about creating a renewed and intentional identity, an identity that you choose on purpose.
Did you even know that this is possible? Let me take a moment to tell you about who I am. I'm Jennifer Collins, the master coach who created The Small Jar. I'm also the mom of two teenage sons, one who just finished his freshman year of college and the other who'll be a senior in high school this fall.
I discovered life coaching about 10 years ago when I came to the realization that I was unhappy and I really didn't have any clue why. There was so much about my life that was wonderful, and yet somehow it wasn't enough. So needless to say, on top of my unhappiness, I felt guilty for feeling that way.
My boys were starting to get involved in activities, and for the first time in a long time, I felt I had space to breathe. And you would think that that would be a good thing, but for me, somehow it highlighted how little time and energy I'd put into myself as a woman separate from my kids. In this way, I think I discovered the challenge of finding my purpose pretty early on, when my kids were barely in middle school.
Add to this the way I learned to deal with the frustrations of my life was to self-medicate with a glass or many of wine at night. It was such a long-standing habit that I never thought anything about it, until I started to realize that I couldn't not pour that glass of wine. It was around this time that I discovered my first life coach and a whole new world opened up to me.
I had no idea how much mindset impacts the way you experience your life. I'd always thought mindset was about having a positive attitude or being willing to work hard. But it also felt a little fake or Stepford Wyvie to think that you could just think happy thoughts and your life would be better.
That just didn't seem real to me. But the more I learned about mindset work and life coaching, I discovered how much it comes down to trusting yourself to decide who you want to be. My first life coach taught me to understand how my drinking habit was just a symptom of me desperately trying to feel better when the circumstances of my life didn't go my way.
I wasn't drinking because I had a problem. I was drinking because I thought it was a solution to my feelings of unhappiness and resentment and anxiety. Understanding this, I began to explore the real problem.
My unhappiness. It was something I hadn't even allowed myself to face because I was masking my emotions with drinking. And frankly, guilt, because I didn't think I had a right to feel unhappy.
I learned so much about myself through the process of breaking my drinking habit. Most importantly, what I learned was how dependent I was on the circumstances of my life going my way in order for me to be happy or even just okay. And to be honest, this isn't even something I think was wrong with me.
It's what we're all taught that other people make us mad or hurt our feelings. Consider this. People say words and do things.
Why is any of that a problem? What do you make those words or actions mean that hurt your feelings? And look, people can say mean and hurtful things. You don't have to convince yourself that they don't. But why are you taking it personally? Why do you let that person get away with hurting you? Who do you want to be when people say things you think are mean? For me in my life back then, who I was on default was a person who took things personally and fought back and then poured a glass of wine to feel better.
Without judging any of it, I found compassion for myself. Why was I fighting so hard? What did I have to prove? I'm sure I could look to my past and find the causes, but the reality was that this was what was true for me at the time. As I gained compassion and understanding of how I was responding, what I was thinking in those moments when people said things I thought were mean, I realized I had a decision I could make.
I didn't have to choose to take things personally. I could trust myself to hear the words other people said and never make them mean anything about me. I learned all of this just because I wanted to drop an unhelpful habit.
I learned about me. And this was my powerful introduction to the life-changing impact of mindset. Little did I know that this early experience was just preparing me for the stress of raising teen boys.
Talk about life handing me an opportunity to see firsthand how dependent my own well-being was on the well-being of my kids. I'd been challenged with managing the highs and lows of my emotions before when my kids were little and still pretty obedient, when they generally liked being around me and did what I told them to do for the most part. Even then, I'd struggled with the daily frustrations and disappointments of life.
But when my boys started testing boundaries, not listening quite so much or getting in trouble, and this was just in the early days of high school, I was like, whoa, this is crazy and hard. But I had also learned tools to help me work through some of these challenges. To find compassion for my anger and anxiety.
To not need to rely on alcohol to numb my emotions. To decide to trust myself to do what I knew in my heart was right. To even trust myself to decide ahead of time that no matter what, I was going to have my back about my decisions, as a mom and as a woman.
Because I realized that was in my power to do. Life had so much in store for me as I embarked on this journey with my boys. I got certified as a life coach and decided to focus my practice on moms of teens.
It seemed so clear to me that this was an area where we moms love our kids so much and want to be the best we can be. And yet, we don't believe in ourselves, often don't trust ourselves to do what we think is right. So I was committed to helping moms and was already building my business and coaching women struggling with the transition to the empty nest.
Struggling with their kids. And then, my oldest son fell in love. And it was amazing at first.
Until it wasn't. At some point, with my son's permission, I'll tell this story. I had never in my life experienced a relationship with a narcissist.
And I got a crash course through my son. I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. But for me as a mom, watching my son go through this, and being absolutely powerless to stop it, to save my son and keep him from pain.
In fact, being completely shut out of his life for a period of time. Heartbreak doesn't even begin to cover the pain I experienced. It was more like grief.
And I share this because I get it. I so deeply understand how hard it is to let go. The fact is, we often do know better.
We often do have experiences that our kids can benefit from, if they'd only listen. How amazing would it be if we could just help our kids shortcut the pain and experience only the joy and success in life. Only, that doesn't seem to be the way of the world.
Notwithstanding all of our good advice and valid warnings, our kids are going to go do things their way. And sometimes that means we have to stand by and watch them crash and burn. It's excruciating, but it's also a gift.
I spent months grieving my son, who had closed himself off to me entirely. It was only because of the coaching tools I had learned, but also the process I was going through as I went through master coach certification. This mentorship and process of self-discovery allowed me to get to a place where I made the decision to love my son so unconditionally that I was willing to let him go.
Here's the thing, I don't think we ever really let go of our kids. My love for my boys will be forever, unconditional and unwavering. And I realized that that would be true for me, even if you chose not to have a relationship with me.
If you listen to episodes dating back to the early days of this podcast, you can actually witness me coaching myself through this incredibly painful time. Now, the challenges you might be experiencing with your teen may not be quite as dramatic as this, but I've coached so many moms who feel on some level this cognitive dissonance of wanting to protect their kids, to obviously keep them safe, but also to safeguard their happiness, to keep them from getting hurt or disappointed, to push them along to help them be successful in life. I felt all of this so deeply with my boys.
And in so many ways, it's made me an extraordinary mom. I'm willing to bet that this is true for you too. But if I'm honest, in other ways, my determination and the depth of my responsibility to help my boys be safe, happy, and successful has sometimes made me show up in ways that I regret.
I don't think we need to be perfect as moms. I don't think there's any such thing, really. It's less about getting it right all the time than it is about trusting yourself to navigate the journey, knowing that no matter what, you're doing your absolute best.
That's the truth, isn't it? But can you imagine what it would be like to approach your life, both your life with kids and your life as a woman apart from your kids, with a sense of peace and confidence, with a conviction that no matter what, you trust in yourself to decide how to move forward. So let me give you a roadmap for this podcast and other resources I have within the small jar. I've been producing the podcast for a few years now, and in every episode, I tackle a particular challenge or goal that I've had or that I see my clients working with.
You can think of every episode as a mini lesson on how to leverage your mind to decide how to approach your life on purpose. It's cultivating the mindset to trust yourself to make these decisions. But as I said before, this isn't about forcing yourself to think happy thoughts about your life.
It's not just looking on the bright side. It's also not forcing yourself to make a decision that you're not ready for. And when I'm talking about trusting yourself to make a decision, I'm not just talking about big decisions.
Think about little decisions like, how am I going to approach this conversation? How do I want to show up to this event? How can I feel better when my mother-in-law comes over? Every single day, you are making decisions about who you are. But very often, we're making these decisions on autopilot, either because of habit or because we have a concept of who we are or who we're supposed to be. In every episode of the podcast, with small examples of daily life, I'm taking you through a simple model that invites you to become aware of the decisions you're already making right now about how you live your life, and then empowering you to decide again, to decide on purpose if that's what you really want in your life.
How you want to approach your relationships, how you want to spend your time, how you decide on and pursue your goals, even how you want to feel in your day-to-day life. These are all decisions you can make on purpose. But first, you have to understand the decisions you're making right now.
I approach all of this work with the goal of fostering curiosity and compassion. I want to celebrate your strengths and also create empathy for those times when you show up in ways that you think aren't good enough or could be better, stripping away all of the guilt and the judgment. All that is left is a decision we've made.
There's always a reason we do what we do. And when we can find it from a place of love, it's like, oh, I get it now. That makes perfect sense.
I gave you the example of my drinking. I spent so long judging myself and thinking something was wrong with me. But when I realized the reason it was so hard for me to give up drinking was because it was how I'd learned to cope and feel better about my life, it was like, oh, sweetheart, that makes perfect sense.
Let's stop judging the drinking and go to work understanding why you need help coping with your life. What's really going on here? This is the work. Understanding yourself from a place of compassion and not shame and judgment.
As I've worked with moms in my one-on-one coaching practice, I've noticed patterns of strength and challenge that apply to all of us in different ways. And so I designed a mom archetype quiz to give a starting point to the process of understanding where you are now. So let me tell you about this quiz.
I've created these four mom archetypes at the kind of Myers-Briggs or Enneagram style view of the role we play as moms. This is really a strengths-based approach. With each of the mom archetypes, I take as a given that every one of us loves our kids and tries our best.
And in fact, I think at different times and stages, we all have a bit of each of these archetypes in us. Sometimes the guardian, sometimes the achiever, the nurturer or mentor. Each of these mom types has incredible skills and strengths.
She goes about her role as a mom with a particular mindset. And this has so many benefits, not only to our kids, but to us as moms. And so as I explore each of these archetypes, I celebrate these unique strengths.
And of course, like any superhero, every hero has that one vulnerability. And so with each of these archetypes, I also explore their particular vulnerabilities, really the downsides of being vigilant, of believing in your child potential, of loving this role of motherhood. Again, the 50-50 of life.
With every gift comes a price. Imagine the downside of being vigilant and a fierce protector of your child is that you worry. You're constantly on hyper alert for danger.
This creates our anxiety. The downside of believing in your child's potential is the anxiety and frustration of helping them get there. The judgments we have about where our kids are now.
So I think of these archetypes as positive, powerful models that also lend themselves to opportunities for self-awareness, opportunity to celebrate, but also to grow. Because what I've also found is that these archetypes and the strengths or vulnerabilities we might have end up showing up in other areas of our lives, with our other goals, challenges, and relationships. For example, I tend to lean into the achiever archetype.
And this has played out in so many positive ways in terms of how I've supported my kids, but also how I've lived my life in general. But again, it's also made me susceptible to difficulty dealing with frustration and disappointment when things don't go my way. Understanding both my strengths and vulnerabilities has been such a gift to me because then I get to lean into my strengths and have compassion for my vulnerabilities.
And in the process, I've learned to overcome them. So check out the mom archetype quiz. It's on my website at www.thesmalljar.com. Then start with episode 103 of the small jar podcast where I explore all four of these archetypes.
I'm creating focused episodes for each of these individual archetypes as well. Another way to think about the vulnerabilities I've described for each of these mom archetypes is that our brains, on default, are looking to keep us safe, comfortable, and to process information quickly and simply. This is just how all of our minds work.
And I want to invite you to think of this normal functioning of our brains as essential to our survival and the evolution of humankind. We're intrinsically motivated to be safe, so we've evolved to create more and more complex ways to protect ourselves. We're motivated to be comfortable at a basic level to seek food and shelter, to be happy and feel connection.
These are all really good things. But because our brains are efficient, we aren't consciously thinking about all of these goals and tasks at all times. In fact, 90% of our thoughts are subconscious.
And because of this, some of the ways we tend to think about ourselves and our lives tend to also get relegated to our subconscious. It's like we've practiced a way of thinking for so long that we don't have to consciously think about it anymore. So the next level of really understanding how your mind works in these powerful ways is to understand how your subconscious mind falls into mindset traps.
You can think of mindset traps as limiting beliefs or unproductive patterns of thinking motivated by your brain's desire to keep us safe, comfortable, and make our lives easy. These traps don't only apply to us as moms. It applies to our kids, our partners.
Every single one of our minds falls into these traps at times. And so understanding these traps helps free you of so much of the negative emotion you might be experiencing as you approach your life with kids, but also life in general. Examples of mindset traps include catastrophizing, all-or-nothing thinking, mind reading, the illusion of control.
Again, none of these traps are signs there's something wrong with you. It's actually evidence that your mind is working exactly as it's meant to work. Only as a result, our minds then create emotions and other results that may not be ideal.
For example, when you catastrophize, you tend to feel anxious and get stuck in this emotion. When you're facing a really stressful situation, particularly with your kids, it actually makes sense that you feel anxious and even that your brain catastrophizes. It's a sign that your brain is trying to solve for or protect you from the worst-case scenario.
Imagine creating so much understanding and compassion for yourself that when you notice your brain is catastrophizing as a natural response to a stressful event in your life, imagine being able to simply notice the thoughts and flip them off like a switch. To decide with empathy and love that you don't need to protect yourself from that catastrophe right now. Learning how to flip that switch starts with understanding your mind.
Now each of the mom archetypes relates to a particular set of mindset traps, these vulnerabilities I talked about. I've also created a separate series of podcasts highlighting the 14 common mindset traps and how they show up in our lives as moms with teens as we approach the empty nest. But start by learning your mom archetype, understanding your gifts and your strengths as a mom, and then you can dive into the particular mindset traps that relate to your type or mom archetypes.
Because as I said, at different times and situations, we can all align with many of the archetypes. So take the mom archetype quiz on my website www.thesesmalljar.com and then listen to the podcast episodes about that archetype and the related mindset traps. I also encourage you to listen to episode 91 on embracing mindset traps and 97 on the love technique, which breaks down in more detail the process I take my clients through in terms of learning about themselves and their minds so that they're empowered to trust themselves to make that next best decision in every area of their lives.
This journey for me has been a journey of discovery and love. It started with the small jar, which is what my mother, sister, and I have called our little trio on a shared mission to find peace and lean into the best version of ourselves. To me, the small jar represents a place of safety, unconditional love, and acceptance.
You come as you are accepting and even loving all of the parts of you, even as you gently move yourself in a direction of growth. This is what I teach in every podcast episode, and in my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0, I take my clients through this process in very intentional way, starting with a vision of what you wish your life would look like, what you envision could be possible for you as you prepare for your next chapter, as you work through challenges with your teens and other areas of your life. You get to give yourself permission to dream about what you want your experience of life to be. And then we get to work understanding what’s holding you back. So often what clients will tell me is that what’s holding them back is something that’s wrong with them, or just who they are. Limitations that they can’t overcome in their life. Or just emotions that make them feel stuck. Maybe even just not knowing what they want. Imagine understanding all of this from a place of love and compassion so that you had the power to decide how to move forward.
In mom 2.0, I teach you the tools to trust yourself to be the woman you want to be. She’s already within you.
Thank you for joining me in the Small Jar. If you haven’t already, get started on the Mom Archetype quiz and then use the podcast as you lesson plan your journey of self-discovery. If this work resonates with you, schedule a time to meet with me to discuss how Mom 2.0 can support you as you design your next chapter.
Discover how to trust yourself to be the mom and woman you want to be.
Until next time friends.
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.
