HOW DO YOU WANT TO FEEL?
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 113.
Hello, my friends. One of my favorite things to do is to dream of what's possible for my life. When I was younger, I remember this being a really scary thing.
And I see it in my boys as they think about their college experience and their futures, that they're so excited but petrified. It's beautiful in a way that we're both, us as moms, along with our kids, we're going through this major transitional phase. Some will call it a liminal space, where you're literally between two different things, two different sections of your life.
The transition doesn't happen all at once. Your kids start to find independence away from you before that moment when you drop them off at college for the first time. Even if it's just in the way they contemplate that next step, they're thinking ahead, preparing themselves for what's to come.
And we all do the same thing well before college, those moments during high school when you're struck by how quickly time is passing. As you prepare for the college process, and amidst all of the uncertainty, you're already contemplating what that next step will look like for your child and for you. I'm now realizing that even after your child goes to college, the liminal space, that transition continues.
They come home for the holidays or for breaks. And even if they're only a few weeks or months between visits, you sense that your child is changing, growing up in ways that you didn't get to witness or influence, having experiences that they may or may not share with you, grappling with ideas that you might not agree with, or trying on new identities that could make you uncomfortable. It becomes this interesting evolution where your child is growing up exponentially and you're running to catch up.
But in the meantime, you're also grappling with your identity, who you are as a mom without kids at home, but sometimes with kids at home. This transition is a continual evolution. And at every moment, I think you have an opportunity to really consider who you want to be, both as a mom and as a woman.
I often say this, that you get to step into being the mom and woman you want to be. And I want to be clear about what I mean, because it's not necessarily being the best version of yourself. I don't know about you, but when I'm really being intentional and honest with myself, I know that being perfect isn't my goal.
Even those of us who would admit that we have perfectionist tendencies ultimately don't think we'll ever be perfect necessarily. Honestly, it's just that we make the mistake of not allowing ourselves to decide what's enough. So we're always chasing that next thing that we think will make us feel like we've done enough, that we've gotten closer to our goal.
So in the same way, being the best version of yourself in any context isn't about being perfect. It's actually about being intentional with who you want to be. And I realize as I say this, what I mean isn't entirely clear.
So today, I want to tackle the subject of creating vision around your life and who you want to be in a new way. When we typically set goals for ourselves, we think of it in terms of something new we want to create, some result that we want to accomplish. Like we might want to meet new friends or start a new hobby, meet a new man or have a better relationship with someone in our lives.
Some of these things are tangible in the sense that you can literally see whether or not you've achieved the result. So if my goal was to make new friends, I could potentially quantify the number of friends that I've made. Or if my goal was to lose weight, obviously I could quantify the change on the scale.
But for some goals we have, it's not as easy to quantify the result. For example, if you want to build a better connection with your children or your spouse, how exactly do you know when you've achieved this? If you were to write a list of measurable things that you might want to see in the relationship that's different from what it looks like now, would that necessarily mean you had a better relationship or a stronger connection? You could say that you wished your husband brought you flowers more often, but then he could do this. And it wouldn't necessarily mean that you would feel more connected.
Another thing that sometimes happens when I talk to women about who they want to be or how they want to grow in their life is that what they'll say is they don't know what they really want. As I think about my clients, there are a number of things that I think are driving this. The first is that this transitional phase brings uncertainty.
As you look ahead to the empty nest, you might not know where your kids are going to college. So you feel some uncertainty about what life's going to look like. Will I have to fly to see them? How often will they come home? Even when they're in college, it becomes a question of whether or not they'll be home for the summers.
In so many ways, you're not sure what the circumstances of your life are going to look like. And so it can feel hard to fill in the blanks in terms of what you would even want to do with yourself. It can feel like there are just too many variables.
I've spoken to so many women this summer who feel like they're in a holding pattern, waiting for their kids to get to college because there's so much going on in their lives and in their heads right now. They just don't have the space to contemplate what lies ahead for them. And I get it.
So there's the I don't know that comes out of uncertainty about the future. And then there's the I don't know that comes from truly not knowing what you even want. It's interesting because I would say a lot of my clients start here.
They don't really know what they want, but they know they don't want to stay where they are either. I think this is where we can fall into the trap of listening to other coaches or even a therapist who might give us advice about what we should do to fill our time or to pursue any goal. I see so many people online posting about how as you get to the empty nest, you should go make new friends or go get involved in your community or even take a pickleball.
And there's absolutely nothing wrong with doing any of those things. In fact, if you feel joy doing those things by all means, do them. The advice isn't wrong.
I think the problem is if you're not sure what it is that you actually want, you can find yourself just seeking out external things to make yourself feel better, just filling your time or signing up for things. I've worked with women who will tell me they've tried new hobbies or made an effort to spend more time with friends only to feel disappointed because they hoped to feel different. Here they've pushed themselves out of their comfort zone, met new people, made an effort, and they don't necessarily feel better.
Advice is tricky. And this is true for any goal you have for yourself, no matter what it is. Weight loss, starting a business, meeting new people, building a better relationship with your team.
Advice is everywhere you look, but then you try it out and it doesn't always land. It's frustrating to say the least because you also get this impression that there's a right way to do things that you're just not getting. Right now my social media feed is filled for some reason with women in midlife who are fitness coaches.
You see these women who look incredible, beautiful, strong bodies, lean, and happy, telling you how much better they feel, showing you their before and after transformations. It's inspiring. And all they had to do was eat more protein, lift heavy, and get in 10,000 steps.
Now, again, this advice isn't necessarily wrong or bad. The issue is more that in practice, achieving the goal is not as simple as just taking the steps that someone else gives you. And here's why.
And just let me use this fitness example as a more broad way to illustrate why sometimes the steps aren't the problem. So you can start your day and tell yourself, I'm going to eat more protein, lift heavy, and get in 10,000 physical steps. Maybe you get to the gym on day one and you do a workout, walk on the treadmill for 30 minutes after.
So that's two miles, 4,000 steps. Then you get home and you're hungry, but you're not quite sure if you should have eaten before you worked out or after. But now you're hungry.
So you go ahead and you have a high-protein breakfast. And maybe you're hungry by noon again and you have a healthy high-protein lunch. But by four, you're famished and you're eating chips.
Then you realize you've been sitting all day and haven't gotten in any more steps, but you don't have time to take another walk. So here you are on day one, the day with the highest likely motivation factor, and you're not quite sure that you've accomplished what you set out to do. You can almost already feel like you've let yourself down.
The next morning you wake up sore and you don't really feel like working out. And before you know it, you've decided it's too much work to get to the gym and eat protein. You didn't feel the way you'd hoped you'd feel, and you definitely didn't see any benefit.
Let me take another example, and this time with parenting. A coach might tell you to listen more than you speak. It's not bad advice, but what does that look like in practice? Some of us have teens that don't talk to us at all.
So if I'm not speaking and they're not speaking, where does that leave us? In other cases, moms feel like all they do is listen. Their teen talks incessantly, tells them everything. So they listen all the time.
Exactly how much should they speak? What's the right amount of speaking? Here's another example of advice. Give your teen privacy. Okay, but then you come across something in their car or their room and it makes you concerned.
You weren't snooping, but there it is in plain sight. Condoms, drug paraphernalia, a backpack of beers under the bed, a pregnancy test. Our teens are not always that good at covering their tracks, and so we, as moms, see a lot, even when we're generally trying to give our kids privacy.
Are you supposed to pretend you didn't see it? Or is it appropriate to address your concerns with your teen, to check in with them to see what's going on, to even establish consequences if it's something you've explicitly told them wasn't allowed? I think most of us would agree that there are some issues that transcend our kids' right to privacy when they're living at home. But the standard parenting advice isn't going to help you draw that line. You can be left feeling really uncertain about the right approach.
So sometimes we aren't sure of what we want, not sure we have enough certainty about our life to really take charge of the decision around what we want. Or we might have goals and be overwhelmed by the advice we're given and frustrated that it's never quite as easy as it seems to follow through with this well-meaning advice. So I want to take a step back and invite you to consider where you are in your journey with your kids or your transition to the empty nest.
Consider the possibility that what you want could have more to do with how you want to feel in your life than a specific tangible goal or accomplishment. No matter where you are, I want you to consider that your vision for your life could be all about how you want to feel in that life. I've actually been thinking about this for myself lately because each one of us experience our lives through our emotions every single day.
Whether you're at peace or overwhelmed, whether you're happy or sad, feeling fulfilled or lost, those emotions color your experience of your life. Think about how many emotions you have during any single day. You have highs and lows.
You could be laughing one minute and crying the next. Life is so rich and so varied in the emotional experience that you have. So what's missing from this conversation about goals and really who we want to be in our lives is that when we experience the journey of taking on goals through this lens of how we feel about all of it and we don't intentionally focus on how we want to feel about it, maybe even being realistic about what we might have to feel about it, we're not only going to be less successful in accomplishing our goals, but we're going to feel terrible along the way.
So let's look at a few of the examples that I gave before through this framework of how we want to feel. Fitness may or may not be something that you care about as a goal, but I want to use this as an example just to start to illustrate the impact of our emotional experience on our lives. So imagine seeing these 50-something women who look so strong and fit, and some of us might think we'd love to work toward that goal.
Maybe not become a midlife bikini model, but just feel better in your body. Notice when you really think about it, what you want is to feel better. Maybe feel leaner, but also feel more confident, more beautiful, more energized.
These feelings aren't measurable. It's just an experience that you have in your body, that strong feeling of confidence. You put on that dress and you look in the mirror and you feel proud of your body.
But what we almost always do is start by looking at our body and thinking to ourselves, well, that's not what I want. We look at our bodies and we don't feel confident or beautiful. But then we see these inspiring women online and we think, maybe if I just take these simple steps, then I'll get to feel these things.
The challenge is that even when you take these simple steps and you follow them to the letter, the change in your body is slow. As simple as the influencers seem to make it with their before and after images, they will all admit that change takes time. You have to be consistent.
You have to be patient. Think about what happens when you don't feel beautiful and confident in your body. What is that feeling for you? Let's just say dislike, discontent, ultimately a negative feeling about yourself and your body.
What type of action do you typically take when you don't like something? The example I always think of is the starvation diets I used to go on when I was younger. I disliked my body so much, I basically thought that I had to take drastic painful measures to get my body as skinny as possible in a short amount of time as possible so I could feel better in my body more quickly. Sadly, it often worked when I was younger, although the weight always came back on.
Now, even these drastic diets don't work the way they used to. Hopefully we've all given up on them by now. But even when we're following this more gradual, age-appropriate advice for health and fitness in our 40s and 50s, if we're taking the action from the feeling of disliking our bodies, maybe even disgust, the quality of our action is negative, maybe even punishing.
Definitely quick to judge, to think that what we're doing isn't good enough. Quick honestly to give up on ourselves because we're so committed to a belief that we're not capable of improving our bodies. We've failed so many times.
Consider what might be different if you loved your body, even with the extra pounds and the lack of muscle. How might you treat your body from a place of love rather than disgust? Imagine really being in tune with what your body wants to eat rather than forcing yourself to eat things you don't like. Imagine choosing workouts that feel good to you, being patient with yourself, acknowledging that you've done your best even when you had to skip the workout or you didn't get in more than 4,000 steps that day.
Imagine being loving, kind, and believing that change was possible for your body. You can actually see the parallel of this approach with parenting. Could you imagine parenting your child or teen from a place of dislike or disgust? No matter how they struggle or talk back, the tantrums they had as a toddler or frankly even as a teen, their mood swings, they may not always be a blast to be around, but you always try to parent from a place of love, right? The way we feel drives the quality of our actions.
So when we're angry or annoyed or anxious about our teens, we know that the way we show up as moms is often less thoughtful, more reactive, and it's also the reality of our life with teens sometimes. So going back to this advice with our teens that we should listen more than we speak, it's honestly easy to do when you feel peaceful and content, feeling connected to your teen, living in the experience of your love for them. My friend, when you and I are in this peaceful, loving place, we are always the mom we want to be.
We listen the perfect amount. We speak calmly and thoughtfully to our teens, lovingly. The challenge is that sometimes we're angry at them.
Sometimes we're really worried. We don't like what we're seeing or hearing and so we speak out of anger or anxiety. In these times, we're not always the mom we want to be, but also we've all been there.
We're not going to be perfect moms all the time. All that said, you can see in parenting and in health goals and in any other goal you set for yourself how impactful our emotional experience is on the quality of the way we show up in our lives, really the quality of the way we experience our lives. Consider how different the experience of taking care of your body would be if you were to cultivate a feeling of self-love before you took one step or lifted one weight.
What might you have to think about yourself and your potential to love yourself and your body enough to approach your day taking care of yourself? Not even necessarily following the advice to the letter, but exploring what works best for you in your life. Consider how different the experience of interacting with your teen would be if you were to approach every interaction from a place of unconditional love and peace rather than anger and anxiety. The powerful thing about parenting is we have so much unconditional love for our kids, but often aren't parenting from a place of unconditional love for ourselves as parents.
Consider the implications for the experience of your life as a whole if you were to be really intentional about how you want to feel in your life. What does that experience look like for you? Do you want to feel more peace, more confident, more loved and connected, more purposeful and even accomplished? Consider that all of these feelings stem from a place of unconditional self-love. Understanding yourself enough to understand the obstacles in your way, the limiting beliefs that are keeping you from feeling the way you really want to feel.
Whatever your goals, even if you don't think you have any goals, ask yourself how do I want to experience my life? How do I want to feel? Now I want to give you an invitation. You don't have to wait for permission to feel these things. In fact, you are the only one who can give these feelings to yourself.
But if you don't feel them right now, if you don't feel confident or at peace, you don't feel connected or accomplished, it's only because you're not giving yourself permission to feel these things until. What is that until for you? The answer to that question is the thing that you think is standing in your way of experiencing your life the way you want to experience it. But what if I told you that it's actually a decision you get to make? You get to love your body right now.
You get to feel confident about yourself right now. You can feel peace in your life right this second. You get to believe that you are enough and you are worthy.
I get it. There are reasons why you don't feel this way right now. But consider that this is a choice that you can make.
You have the power to experience your life in a whole new way, to decide how you want to feel in every minute of your life. Imagine the impact on your daily life, on your relationships, on your self-image. Imagine waking up in the morning and making the decision to feel exactly how you want to feel.
It's simply a decision that requires you to step into a new mindset about how you look at your life. Helping you make this decision and break through any of the obstacles you think are in your way of making that decision to feel exactly the way you want to feel in your life, this is what I teach you in my coaching program, MOM 2.0. Imagine the power of being the version of yourself who knows how to step into peace, confidence, connection, and love. It's a decision that you have the power to make.
Until next time, my 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.
