HAVING YOUR OWN BACK
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 119.
Hello, my friends. This morning I was thinking about a goal that I have, and I recognized that I was feeling disappointed because I was looking for evidence that I was moving towards that goal. In fact, I was looking for very specific evidence, and my mind wanted to tell me that if I could see that evidence, I would feel better.
I'm being intentionally vague because you can apply this situation to any goal, and I want to encourage you, right off the bat, to think about your own goals and what evidence you're looking for that you think will make you feel better when you see it. So if your goal is to support your kids in some way, then the evidence you might be looking for is something specific that your kids might do or say that if you saw it, you'd be able to think, I've done enough, they're okay, and then you think you'd feel better. This could be anything from seeing them smile to achieving something really big.
Whether you realize it or not, there are certain markers you're looking for to confirm that your child is on the right track. Sometimes if our goals are to grow in some way, maybe to be less anxious or frustrated, we might be looking for evidence that these emotions don't come up for us in a way that feels overwhelming or as often. We may even want to see evidence that other people recognize that we're being more patient or confident, less short-tempered.
If your goal is to move forward with a business, you might be looking at revenue or client goals. With weight, you might be looking for a number on the scale. So with any goal, you can think about what that thing is that you're looking for, specifically in your mind, that you think demonstrates progress.
And of course, when we don't see that measure of progress, then we feel disappointed or frustrated or let down, maybe even anxious if it comes down to goals we have with our kids. Not being where you want to be can feel challenging. And so as I was thinking about this this morning and recognizing my own disappointment, I realized that I also thought I needed that specific evidence that I was tying to proof that I was making progress.
Because the truth is that I thought if I could only see that specific evidence, then I would get to feel better. Seems obvious, right? But then I asked myself this question, what if my success as it relates to my goal was inevitable? What if just by me showing up day after day to this goal, whether it's parenting or some personal goal, that the success and the progress I'm looking for is already happening, even if I can't see it yet. Now for me, this is a goal that I've been working on for some time.
And I think in my mind that if I just saw the evidence of what I'm considering is the right measure of progress, then I could give myself permission to believe I'm on the right track, that I'm moving forward. But then I realized I have the power to give myself permission to believe that I'm moving forward right now. Now, it might kind of sound like I'm trying to convince myself to be delusional, but stick with me because what's the alternative? I could believe it's not working, that I'm wasting my time, that I'll never be good enough.
And let's face it, these are the thoughts that grow through our minds when we don't see the evidence we're looking for. But my friend, you are always the one who gives yourself permission to believe in yourself and what you're capable of. In fact, you're the only one who can do that for you.
Someone else can say, I believe in you, but ultimately, you have to be the one to believe it in order to feel it yourself. You are also the only one who can take that belief in yourself away. And I guess the question we all have to ask ourselves is, why would we do that to ourselves? I've been thinking about the mom archetype series that I did over the summer where I discussed the four types of moms that I created that celebrate our unique strengths as moms who love their kids and are always doing their best.
The four types I created were the guardian, the achiever, the nurturer, and the mentor. And today, I want to circle back to the mentor and talk about how we can leverage the strengths of this archetype to create more of what we want in our life, either for ourselves or for our life with our kids. Believe it or not, the mentor archetype seems at first to be the least common among the archetypes.
I created an online quiz to give you the chance to find out your own mom archetype. So you can find the quiz on my website at www.thesmalljar.com. Now, I've had close to a thousand submissions for the quiz, and amazingly, only about 8% of moms identify as the mentor. And to be clear, and you'll have seen this if you took the quiz, we are all some combination of the types.
Not purely one type, but some mix of the three or four types. Because they each tap into a different aspect of how we show up as moms. Whether the guardian, focused on her child's safety.
The achiever, wanting to support her child's success. The nurturer, focused on unconditional love. Or the mentor, who acts as the cheerleader, believing in her child's potential as a whole being.
As moms, we are all of these things. But depending on the challenges we might face with our kids, we might lean into particular aspects of one or more of these archetypes. Now, as I talk about leveraging the strengths of these mom types, I wanted to start with the mentor because I actually think there is so much potential in this type that's worth exploring on a deeper level.
Now, the mentor mom is focused on helping coach her child to be the person who realizes their full potential. She's focused on the whole picture of her teen and their well-being, their potential as a human. The mentor mom is the consummate cheerleader.
One of her key strengths is that she believes in her kids and believes they have the potential already within them to be exactly who they want to be. Think about this in the context of what I was sharing before. The mentor mom has the ability to see and believe in her child's potential before there's any evidence that this potential actually exists.
This mom gives herself permission to believe in her child no matter what. Actually, even when the evidence is stacked against some aspects of her kids' potential. This is actually a superpower, my friend.
Believing in what's possible even before our kids believe it for themselves. Now, because the mentor is thinking about her child's potential in the broadest sense, it's not just about success or achievement. This potential we want for our kids has them thriving, happy, connected, with friends, with someone they love, pursuing goals, inspired, and motivated.
If we're honest, we want the fairy tale version of life for our kids. Maybe we want to give them the parts of life we never had, or had in a way that was less than what we wanted. Or maybe we have experienced blessings and happiness in our lives that we want them to be able to experience as well.
It all makes perfect sense. Why would we choose to want anything less for these people we brought into the world and love more than anything else? At our best, when we moms are living into the mentor archetype, we offer support and encouragement to our kids. We try to make our kids feel valued.
We tell them we believe in them. We try to build up their self-esteem and their confidence. We see the best in them, and we see it as our privilege and responsibility to help them recognize and develop their strengths.
It seems to me that this is how we all want to show up for our kids every day. But as our kids grow up and become teens, we start to see more clearly what type of clay we're molding. This is when we start to see evidence that runs counter to our hopes for them.
Maybe we start seeing that they don't seem motivated, or that they're not particularly social, that they're not academically inclined, or have never had a romantic relationship. We inevitably see signs that something isn't quite what we hoped, that the potential that we've dreamed is possible for them is in jeopardy. But the interesting thing is we don't give up on them.
Although our minds for sure fall into traps like labeling, overgeneralization, and comparison. All of the vulnerabilities I talked about in the Mentor Mom archetype episode, I believe it was 109. So we label.
Essentially, we judge. We see evidence that our kids aren't quite living up to their potential, and at times we can react to that perceived evidence or our judgments of our kids. And then we show up in ways that are sometimes not particularly productive or helpful.
Ultimately, the key vulnerability of the mentor archetype is that she can fall into the judgment mindset, looking for flaws or risk factors in her kids. Getting back to where we started this conversation, she's looking for evidence that her kids are either living up to their potential or falling short. And because we feel this sense of responsibility as moms, as the coach, as the one who believes in her child's potential, we can feel like we're failing if we can't support our child in maximizing their potential.
Just think about what's happening in your mind when you believe in your kid's potential so much, and yet you start to see signs that some aspect of this potential is at risk. We still want to believe in their potential, and so our first level of response to what we're seeing in the world that's not matching what we hope is that we're thinking it should be different, or that what's happening is a problem, or will be a problem in the future. So at minimum, we likely feel some pressure and personal responsibility as a mom to help guide our kids toward that higher potential outcome that we see for them.
That's really what coaches do, right? They guide and support. But these judgments about where our kids are now can cut both ways, because on the one hand, we all judge. It's a natural part of our human mind to assess and develop an understanding of what we see is good or bad, matching our expectations or not.
And let me just take us off the hook for that, because I actually think one of the reasons why the mentor mom archetype has tended to be one of the least common of the four archetypes, at least as a primary type, is that I don't think we like to admit how much we judge our kids. And I really want to reiterate that I don't think this is a problem. I think it's our natural instinct.
We're looking for danger. We're not judging because we're these mean, awful people looking for flaws to be antagonistic towards our kids. In fact, the reason we judge is because we care so much and want to help and support them.
This judgment is literally the natural byproduct of our role as the coach and the mentor for our kids. This is why I wanted to start with this archetype and the strengths of the mentor, because of this challenge that we don't want to admit that we're judging our kids. Because here's the thing, we're judging whether we like it or not.
But when we're not honest with ourselves about that, we miss an opportunity to really evaluate the thoughts our brains are giving us. Truly, my friend, you don't have to believe everything you think. We are all viewing our lives, our kids, through a lens.
And we're inevitably looking for danger, even focusing on the negative. If you're not taking responsibility for supervising that part of your brain, you're automatically going to be focusing on those areas or aspects of your kids that aren't reaching their potential without at least giving equal airtime to all of the ways that they are. When we don't take a step back and watch our mind and evaluate our judgments, this is what we create.
We believe our judgments as true, and we think this is a problem, it's not good enough, and we feel disappointed. Maybe we think there's something wrong with them, that they're not trying harder to live up to their potential, and then we feel frustrated. From that energy, we typically nag them to change, to do better.
When this leads to fights, we feel disconnected from our kids, and then we judge ourselves for not handling the situation better. We can also think that we did something wrong, that they're turning out this way, not trying hard enough in life. We blame ourselves, and we feel guilty.
We're not sure how to make any of this better, so we feel confused and unsure. Another byproduct of this is that we don't see the ways in which our kids might actually be doing their best right now. We don't consider that they're working really hard to figure out how to reach their potential.
It just looks different than what we want it to look like right now. And the worst case scenario here, I think, is that we start to lose our belief in our kids' potential. All this, my friends, because we don't stop to question the stories our brains sometimes tell us about what's true in the world.
And look, I'm not saying you're making all this up. If you have judgments or concerns about your child, I am sure there are facts you can point to. The problem is more when we don't stop to question what we're making those facts mean.
Most significantly, that this problem that we see means that my kid is destined to fail, to be unhappy, or not self-actualized. Consider the power of the mentor mom, that she believes so deeply in the potential of her child. Consider that you also have the power to take the extra step of believing in your child's potential even when you can't see evidence that it's happening yet.
It's actually mind-blowing to think that you've been doing this all along with your kids, believing in their potential, well before you had any proof that it would happen. But at this stage, I think there's also so much pressure for us as moms with teens and college kids, because we still feel like we have a hand in molding the clay. And so we feel this responsibility to get all of this self-actualization under their belt before they leave us.
Because God knows when they're out there in the world and we're not there to protect them and support them and help them fix things when they mess up, that they're not going to be able to do it on their own. And I wonder if we're not always giving them credit for how they might be able to figure it out. I also like to think about how all of our actions come from our feelings and thoughts.
So when our kids are doing things that we view to be not quite what we hope for them, their actions are coming from their current mindset about their life. And that mindset is not fixed. They've got so much growing to do, so much self-discovery.
Sometimes I think we fall into these mindset traps, the labeling, generalization, and mind reading, assuming we know what's going on in our kids' minds. And we believe all of these judgments about our kids without question. Or we take the differences between our expectations and reality as evidence that our kids won't reach their potential.
Look, as our kids grow up, we start to see their strengths and weaknesses in a different way. And there could be some dreams we had for them that don't seem as realistic anymore. But does that have to mean that they're not going to fully reach their potential in their own way? Maybe you're wrong about your desire to have them be super social or academic or athletic or whatever the dream was that you had that seems no longer possible.
But could it be that aspect of their potential, or even the failure they experience through pursuing some of their goals, is setting them up for something so much more as they evolve and grow up? I've spent a lot of time in this Mom Archetype series talking about how the strengths and vulnerabilities of these archetypes apply to our kids. But I think what's even more powerful, believe it or not, is how we can apply these strengths and recognize these vulnerabilities for ourselves in our lives as moms and women. So here's something to consider.
This strength of the mentor to believe in her kids' potential so deeply, I think it's beautiful that we're able to live into this belief so easily, so intentionally, because of how much we love and are dedicated to our children. Think about it. You don't have to talk yourself into believing in your kids.
You just do. But think about how little intention we put into believing this for ourselves, believing in our own potential. I see it time and time again, my friends.
We judge ourselves ruthlessly. We label ourselves and overgeneralize. We believe all these judgments about ourselves as the truth.
We don't even question it. In fact, because we think it's the truth, it's like we've committed to this being who we are, as if it's fixed. Not only do we not question these judgments about ourselves being the truth, we don't ask the simple question, is this something I want to believe about myself? You can believe anything you want to believe about you.
No one else gets to tell you what to think. Yet every single day, we let other people's opinions sway who we think we are. We let baggage from our past determine what we think we're capable of.
We even let therapists diagnose us into thinking we're a certain way because of our past. And whether they tell us this or not, we make it mean that this is something we can never change or reconsider for our future. This is what happens when we believe the judgments we have about ourselves.
We believe I'm not good enough. We feel disappointed in ourselves. We think I don't know how to change, or I'm not capable of changing, and we feel frustrated and stuck.
The judgments that we have about ourselves make us feel ashamed. We also don't take the time to celebrate and recognize all of the ways we are doing our best right now. We don't give ourselves credit for showing up every day.
And the worst case, for me, this is the tragedy of this uninvestigated way of thinking. We lose our belief in ourselves. And unlike with our kids, we are pretty quick to give up on this, my friends.
This is heartbreaking. No matter where you've been, what you've experienced, or even what you've done, in this moment, you get to decide who you are. You get to decide that you want to step into the version of yourself who starts to believe in her own potential again.
My friends, think about how powerful it is when we step fully into the mentor mindset. With our kids, we naturally lean into believing in their potential way more than 50% of the time. Even if you're struggling with your kid, there is still a big part of you that's holding onto the belief that they are capable of so much more in their lives.
But with ourselves, we may not even be holding onto this belief 10% of the time. Certainly less than the belief we have in our kids. We judge ourselves so harshly and we don't even feel bad about that.
We shame ourselves because we think we're broken or that we're not enough. But my friend, none of that is true. I guarantee you that you couldn't prove it in a court of law.
We can interpret the facts of our lives in so many different ways. Ask yourself, what is the upside of painting such a negative picture? Judgments and assessments of where we are can be helpful as long as we approach it with a growth mindset. This is where I am now and I have the potential to grow in ways I can't even fathom right now.
This is what's possible when you continue on the journey of self-growth. And I imagine for those of you who are listening, who have been on this path for a while, you have experienced moments of self-discovery that have moved the needle for you in terms of what you think is possible. But I want to invite you to consider that there is so much more for you.
There is so much more that your mind is capable of. If you start to lean into the strength that I know you have, because you are a mom who believes deeply in her kids, you can apply that same strength to yourself. You can lean into that same unconditional belief that even if I don't see the evidence right now, I am moving forward.
Embrace your strengths and gifts as a mentor, both with your kids and for yourself, my friend. This is the heart of what we do with my clients in my one-on-one coaching program, Mom 2.0. We discover all of the ways that you are judging yourself without even realizing it, and how those judgments are holding you back from living into your full potential. Whether that's your potential to accomplish specific goals, or just the potential to have the experience of the life that you want to live.
More peace and happiness and fulfillment. Time is fleeting on this earth, my friends. There's so much life ahead of you.
Why would you wait to start taking advantage of stepping into that potential? Why would you choose to believe that potential wasn't possible for you? This morning, as I thought about my own goals and decided to believe that I am moving forward, it was like a door opened and I knew what the next step was. I knew that the possibility of my life is waiting for me to realize it. I know you have the power of the mentor within you.
I know you have the skill of deciding on purpose that your kids have infinite potential. In your life right now, you have the power to apply the skill set to your own life, as your own cheerleader. This is the way forward.
I see the potential in you, even if you can't see it yet.
Until next time, my friend.
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.
