THE ONE OBSTACLE SERIES - OVERCOMING OVERWHELM
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. Hi there.
Before I get started, I want to invite you to a special masterclass I'm having on November 19th. It's about creating peace for the holidays. You don't want to miss this as you head into this holiday season.
Register at www.thesmalljar.com forward slash one obstacle. I'll see you there. Episode number 128.
Hello friends, and welcome back to this week's installment of the One Obstacle series. This series is all about creating the power to overcome the challenges we face as moms and midwife. Not only that, it's about creating the power to design the experience of the life that you want.
We all face different challenges, whether with our kids, the transition to the empty nest, or any number of other things going on in our lives right now. But there is one common denominator, and that is the one obstacle we are all facing. The one thing standing in our way of creating that more empowered version of our lives.
And that one obstacle is a painful emotion. Are there reasons we feel the way we do? For sure. Do triggers exist out there in the world, out of our control to fix? Yes, absolutely.
And this is exactly why I'm so excited about this series, because we do not have control over the changing circumstances of our lives. We don't have control over or even influence over the people in our lives as much as we might think we do. And this is true even of those we love the most.
And so in the face of all of this powerlessness, I want to share with you how to find your power. And that's about finding power over your emotional experience. I have to tell you that I woke up the other day and felt this heavy weight had been lifted from my heart.
Do you ever experience this? Like this feeling of peace and gratitude where you're truly free from pain for this beautiful, possibly fleeting moment. And you actually experience it as gratitude. Like, thank God I feel at peace right now.
I woke up, I felt so unhurried and unburdened. I took a walk out in this beautiful fall weather, and it was like the day was for me, open to me. As a coach, I love exploring my own feelings, and so I decided to get really curious about why I felt different.
It's interesting because I talk a lot about how we often give away our power over our emotional well-being to the circumstances of our lives. Basically that we allow our emotional well-being to be dependent on people doing what we want, or things going our way so that we can feel okay. And this is such a powerless place to be, but we all do it.
When I'm not being intentional with my mindset, I fall into it as well. It's like our gut instinct is to look at the circumstances of our lives as the problem that needs to be solved in order for us to feel better. It's very rational, actually.
In fact, I was just writing a post about how we as humans are problem solvers. It's part of our DNA to be looking for solutions. It's a human instinct to keep ourselves safe and out of danger.
That fight-or-flight instinct to either run away from danger or fight like hell so that nothing happens to us. We also have instinctual desire to feel better, to find comfort, to make life simpler. It's a profoundly valuable skill set of our minds to look for solutions, to want to make our lives better.
And my friend, I am the first to advocate for your right to do everything in your power to feel better, to create a happy life, to support and protect those that you love. I don't think the problem solving is the problem. In fact, I'm on a even hourly basis engaged in the project of feeling good in my own life.
This isn't a passive endeavor. It's actually something that my mind is actively engaged in all of the time. I'm very aware of how my mind is interpreting my life, judging how other people show up, creating expectations, looking for problems.
This is my brain on autopilot, and this will always be true. And that doesn't have to be a problem if you're willing to engage in the active work of being curious. And I say all of this because as I woke up the other day and I felt such a weight lifted, such a sense of peace that frankly has been elusive to me over the past few months if I'm being really honest.
I decided to get really curious. What exactly changed? Because if I'm honest, I've been working on creating peace in my life constantly. It's probably the one emotion that for me has been the feeling that I have to work the most intentionally to create.
There are a lot of things I can point to that make it a challenge for me to create peace. First, I have a natural desire to achieve, and this relates to everything from the actual goals I have in my life to whether or not I check everything off of my daily to-do list. As a mom, I also notice that I'm constantly engaged in the work of wanting my boys to be safe, happy, and successful, of feeling responsible to help them make that happen.
And let's face it, other people stand in the way of our peace it seems. They don't do what we want them to do. They actually can stand in the way of us getting what we want in our mind or just make our lives more difficult.
My pet peeve is the person who just says no without being willing to explain the reason or listen to why the answer could be reasonably yes. Of course, the underlying assumption in my brain is that I'm right and the other person is wrong, so at least I'm self-aware. At this point, I've learned so much about myself through many years of coaching and self-coaching, understanding my true desires, and creating so much compassion for my instincts, the mindset traps my brain falls into, my unrealistic desire for everyone to agree with me.
It all makes so much sense to me now, and honestly, there are times when my brain wants to have a tantrum about something and I just laugh, thinking, yep, I know you want to have a tantrum about that because that person shouldn't have said that thing or done that thing, but they did. And you get to be in charge of both not making it about you and deciding how or really if you need to respond. It's so incredibly freeing and empowering to understand how our brains create our emotional experience and being able to direct your well-being in the way that you want.
I've come so far in this, but life continues to give us challenges, doesn't it? The truth is, we're not meant to be happy all of the time. This morning, I was truly curious as to why, after working so diligently over the past two months to direct my brain to peace, to work through the challenges of my life intentionally, that all of a sudden I woke up and the storm cloud had lifted. I could give credit to the circumstances of my life improving.
Over the past few months, there have been a few important events that have required me to show up at a really high level. There have been a few circumstances that were uncertain. On top of all of this, my baby's been going through the college process and the only major thing that changed was that my son submitted his first round of applications.
Nothing has been decided. We have no certainty around where he'll end up. He has more work to do, but a handful of applications are in, and I've gotten through a few major hurdles and events in my life.
I could certainly give credit to these circumstances for my feeling of peace, but truth be told, I could just as easily focus on all of the uncertainty ahead. I could be focusing on how there are still big hurdles and events ahead of me, but this morning, that wasn't my perspective. Instead, my focus was on peace, on the job done.
In fact, in my mind, the thought that kept coming up was, there's nothing more for me to do or I've done enough. It's truly out of my hands. I'm proud of how I showed up.
I'm proud of how my son showed up. The first thing to point out is that the circumstances weren't driving my peace. It was all in my perspective.
The series of thoughts that I fully believed that I had done enough, that my work was complete for now. I leaned into those thoughts and fully embraced them, but I'm also curious about why these thoughts have been so much more difficult for me to access over the past few months. Why is it hard for me to say to myself, I've done enough? And my friend, my coaching process isn't a question designed to find some deep, dark secret from your past.
This isn't about how you were raised or your inability to let go of your kids. This isn't about there being something wrong with you. This is simply a matter of getting really curious about what is holding you back from giving yourself permission to believe that one sentence that will bring you peace.
That's it, a permission that we have the power to give ourselves, but also permission that we so often withhold. And the truth is, over the past few months, I didn't believe I'd done enough. And even as I coached myself through the stress of the past few months, I knew I had the option to stop, to let go, but I wasn't able to.
But what I could do was give myself compassion through the stress and the worry that came up for me, because I still thought something was required of me, that there was some problem that I still needed to fix. Some amount of work that still needed to be done. Sometimes when you're in the midst of challenging circumstances, you can want to escape it.
You can feel like the reality of your life is that you're not where you want to be. That's your truth. There's no sugarcoating it or telling yourself to look on the bright side.
There are truly times in life when the circumstances you're facing are challenging, not easy to fix or solve. What often comes up with my clients is that they feel self-doubt around whether they can handle the weight of their emotional experience. That it's just too much.
It's scary when you feel terrible and you have no idea how to fix it. It's one thing when you feel angry or hurt and you can clearly identify the cause. Maybe your teen said or did something that made you upset in the moment.
You understand the trigger and so you feel like the emotion makes sense. You attribute the emotion to what your teen just did. Maybe you still don't have the answers around how to change your kid's behavior but the cause of your emotion seems clear.
The problem you're solving for seems clear. In contrast, I think this stage of life lends itself to a certain degree of ambiguity around why we feel as terrible as we do. I have this conversation with women so often where they'll point to certain circumstances in their lives, whether it be the approaching empty nest or a situation with their teen or someone else in their life, and they'll describe the situation.
But even as they talk about it, it's like they'll realize that the emotion they're experiencing seems to feel so much bigger than that one situation. It's like, yes, the situation pissed me off but really it shouldn't have bothered me this much. I don't know why I'm overreacting or I feel so anxious about my teen even though everything seems to be okay.
You can truly start to question your sanity because your emotional experience can feel so out of your control. Your emotions can feel like they're tied up in a knot, tied up in a big black ball, intertwined and interlocking and difficult to understand and unravel. It can feel like something heavy and all-consuming, coloring every aspect of your life.
Or maybe you can feel like you're standing in the ocean at the breaking point and the waves keep coming and knocking you over again and again. This emotional overwhelm, the sense that your emotional experience is overtaking your life. It's something that not a lot of people talk about and yet it's been such a common experience with many of my clients.
I can relate so deeply to this feeling. In fact, I think it's exactly the reason why I was so attracted to coaching because I reached a point in my life where I didn't feel like I had the answers to why I was feeling so terrible. I've always been a proactive fixer in my life.
When I see problems, I've trusted myself to find solutions. But at one point, I reached a stage when my boys were first becoming teens where I didn't even know where to start to find solutions. I was just unsatisfied and unhappy in my life and I wasn't even really sure why.
I could absolutely pin blame on some of the circumstances of my life, and of course I did, which only fueled my resentment because the circumstances of my life were unchangeable in that moment. Or at least they were things that I didn't have immediate control over. And just think, even as moms, as our kids have grown up, we've been used to having some degree of power in our lives.
We've had so much agency in being able to align our kids' lives in ways that were consistent with our values and our comfort level. How many times did you successfully avoid setting up that playdate with the friend that you thought was a bad influence on your kid? You could arrange extracurricular activities for your kid in a way that fit into your life, that were your decision ultimately. And don't get me wrong, I know you made sacrifices for your kids.
You absolutely went out of your comfort zone and did things that maybe you preferred not to do, but you did it for your kids and it was your decision to make. Now consider how many of these choices are no longer something you have any control over or really any say about in your kids' lives. How they spend their time, who they choose to spend their time with, whether or not they choose to engage with you.
And then we're grappling with this change as we face the empty nest, redefining who we are and how we spend our time. And while on the one hand it may seem obvious that that should be something that's in our control in terms of how we spend our time, for example, but it's remarkable how difficult it can feel to engage in those decisions in an empowered way. And the reason all of this can feel so hard comes down to this intertwined ball of emotions that we're experiencing.
This combination of doubt, worry, sadness, hurt, resentment. Not one emotion, but many emotions overlapping and crashing over us like waves. Often clients will say to me, I know I should be letting this go with my kid, or I know I should be more confident making this decision.
As if there's some grading scale on the way we should be acting at this time of life that would be the right way, what we perceive would be the way where we would feel peaceful and confident. So how do you create this peace and overcome this emotional overwhelm? In the series I've been framing this question around the three steps you can take to overcome the emotion that's the obstacle standing in your way of creating those feelings that you do want. So if you're feeling overwhelmed, this huge ball of emotions that feel out of your control.
In my mind, one way to frame it is to think the simple goal is to create peace instead. Now the first step in moving from overwhelm to peace is to recognize what's not in your control. Now I imagine if you're experiencing emotional overwhelm, the first thing you think that's out of your control is your emotional experience.
That these emotions are happening to you. If you think about this whole series and the concept behind the emotion being the obstacle, if you think that the emotion is entirely out of your control, it's no wonder you're stuck. And this isn't your fault.
We have all been raised to believe that our life and other people are responsible for our feelings or that they cause us to feel the way that we do. Although it might feel unfamiliar, I want to offer you that you do actually have power over your emotions. In fact, in my one-on-one coaching program, I take you a step-by-step process to help you understand exactly how your emotions are in fact in your control.
Truly, you do have agency over your emotional experience, but no one has ever shown you how to understand your emotional experience from this perspective. So back to this question, where do you not have control? The simple answer is that you don't have control over the circumstances of your life. Not the people in your life, not the passage of time or the past.
There are a series of facts that are true about your life right now, in this moment, and you can't just snap your fingers and change them. One big area where we create pain for ourselves is when we want to fight reality. We either tell ourselves we shouldn't be here or we're determined to somehow change things that are just not in our control.
When we're talking about emotional overwhelm, there are often so many layers to what we wish were different, and I think this can be the biggest challenge, that these layers are interwoven, each one of them amplifying the general feeling that life isn't quite what you want it to be and you're not sure how to move past that. We're so used to thinking we need to solve the problem of our lives or the problem with other people so that we can feel better, but when we can't fix that person or the circumstance, or frankly, we're not even sure what the problem is, it's even more important to be very clear with ourselves about what's not in our control. This simple step can bring to light so much awareness about the pain you might be creating by trying to change things out of your control.
The second step is really important because the message here isn't that there's nothing for you to do, that you should just let go and stop trying to get life to better align with what you want. This next step is to recognize where you do have control. Now, the obstacle I'm talking about today isn't one emotion, it's this big ball of emotions, layers of stress, anxiety, guilt, sadness, resentment, frustration, whatever emotions this overwhelm might encompass for you when you're feeling this sense of emotional overwhelm.
And so one area where you do have control is to be curious about what's creating your emotions. If you can't blame the circumstances of your life, if you can't blame other people, and if it's not even about blaming yourself, how can you be really curious about what else is really going on for you? One way you have control is to be curious about your own mind. I'll give you an example from my own life when I was grappling with this emotional overwhelm.
It was a number of years ago, my boys were in their early teens and were out with my husband at band practice. They were out doing something that they loved and I was at home folding laundry. I was annoyed that my whole family was out having these fun experiences and I was home playing house.
And the interesting thing is, even at the time when I was having this thought, it was easy to because it was like, well, okay, I'm a big girl. If my issue is really that I want to go have fun experiences, then the answer is clear that I should just go out and do that. My husband wasn't telling me to sit home and do laundry on a Sunday.
Nothing was stopping me from making my own plans. Do you ever do that? Try to ask yourself why something is bothering you so much and you don't really have an answer or you tell yourself the answer should be easy. So for me, if the problem truly was that I wanted to go out and have fun, I should just make the decision to do that.
As I got really curious and started unraveling the pieces of that big black ball of emotions, trying to understand why I was feeling the way that I was. When I was really honest with myself about the fact that I couldn't actually blame my husband or certainly my boys for how I was feeling because they weren't stopping me from getting a hobby. For me, understanding the layer of resentment had more to do with me understanding why I wasn't making the decision to go and do something about it.
Being curious, understanding each of the strands that made up that big ball of overwhelm, unraveling these strands one by one led me to understand what I actually needed to feel better. It helped me to get to know myself so that I understood the lens I had created to look at my life and how that perspective was creating my emotional pain. Now this work of understanding where you have control, it's not about understanding where you have control over other people and it's not about understanding where you have control over the circumstances of your life.
This work is about understanding where you have the power to develop the skill of such deep curiosity about your own experience so that when you do have negative emotions, you know exactly where they're coming from. You have a deep sense of compassion for the perspective or the identity that you bring to your life that makes certain circumstances or certain interactions with other people challenging. Fast forward to the past few months when I came up against some circumstances that felt really big to me.
Life inevitably brings new challenges and as moms, our kids are inevitably going to be a trigger for our emotions, good and bad. That piece of my experience has come to make so much sense to me. That instinct to love and protect and nurture and support my boys is actually something I don't ever want to coach myself out of.
I don't have any desire to tell myself I shouldn't be anxious about my boys or that my emotions aren't valid or appropriate. I simply have the self-love and compassion to be able to say to myself, of course this is a problem for me. My son is going through the college process and I feel like I'm going through it for the first time because it's such a dramatically different experience than what happened with my older son a few years ago.
Truth be told, both times it was challenging for me and although the circumstances were different, the common thread was my deep desire for my boys to feel successful. I think some of that comes from the belief in my mind that success and happiness are intertwined. Success to me doesn't mean making a lot of money necessarily.
The way I define success is putting your all into something and having no regrets, persevering, even failing until you reach a point where you've accomplished your goal or done everything in your power to get there. I'm not offering this as the right way, I'm just being self-reflective because this perspective has driven the way I've approached supporting my boys and their own success. Truth be told, this perspective actually created a lot of problems between me and my oldest son when he was in high school.
My lesson that first time around was to learn and respect that while my boys both have been raised to understand the importance of hard work, the way they view success and how they choose to apply themselves is not up to me. This is just one example of how understanding my lens around success helped me to recognize what was not in my control, but even more importantly what was in my control, namely my view of how my boys should apply themselves and pursue success. But this process also helped me create some compassion for myself because given my perspective around hard work and success, the college process is fraught for me.
I have this instinct to want to insert myself when I'm not needed and to get frustrated when my suggestions aren't met with enthusiasm. All of that worry and stress is about me, it's not about my boys. And having gone through this process of really honest self-coaching to understand why I was feeling so anxious, I realized how it was my perspective rather than the college process creating that emotion.
And this understanding allowed me to approach my youngest son's college process with a much deeper level of self-awareness. That's not to say that I haven't felt anxious for the past few months because I have, but the difference is I've been so clean in my ability to say my anxiety is about me and my dreams for my kids and not the college process or what my son is doing or any other circumstance out of my control. And it's so interesting that my mind over the past few days has given me permission to just let it all go, to think nothing for me to do to help support my child.
Even though there's going to be work ahead for him and even though there's still uncertainty on the horizon, I'm letting go of all of it. And that's something my mind is doing. It's not life happening to me.
Realizing that and really taking ownership allows me to see how going forward through the rest of this process, I can continue to lean into this thought that there is nothing for me to do and continue to recognize when my brain wants to offer that there's something different my son should be doing and I'm responsible for making it happen or making sure that he does it. These are all thoughts that I'm going to have to be aware of and it doesn't have to be a problem unless I make it a problem. This is me on default being a who loves her son and wants him to be successful.
And you know what? I don't apologize for it. My children know I am their passionate cheerleader and I will do everything in my power to help them be successful. And it doesn't have to look perfect.
I don't have to get it right all the time. That's all part of me being a human in this life doing my best. I actively choose to love myself through that anxiety that I create because I so deeply care about my kids and want them to be successful.
But I am also embracing this moment where I get to lean into the thought that there's nothing for me to do here. I can't tell you how empowering it is to find that one thought that you believe with all your heart that truly allows you to embrace the emotion that you want to experience. And for me that thought is simply there is nothing more that I need to do.
It's such a simple thought. But for me that thought is literally the difference between me feeling peace and me feeling a sense of constant anxiousness and worry that there is something for me to do. It's such a powerful reminder because it's a simple shift in my mind.
I can give myself permission to stop and let go of my responsibility and tell myself there's nothing more for me to do at any time. I could have been giving myself that permission back when my boys were at band practice and I was at home feeling resentful and folding laundry. I could also have been giving myself that permission more regularly over the past couple months.
But I also recognize that there is a part of me that's not quite ready to let go of my responsibility, of my desire to be standing on the sidelines, making sure that there's nothing left for me to do. I'm not quite ready to let that go and right now I'm willing to let that be okay. I'm learning to recognize this responsibility when it comes up and I also know how to take step three, to actively decide if there is actually something that I need to do or if I need to stand back and let my boys take the lead.
More often than not these days I make that decision and it's just such a beautiful process, such a gradual process of me letting go. For me, my friend, these thoughts, I have so much to do. It's not enough.
I have to get it all done. These thoughts have plagued every area of my life. They've held me back from giving myself permission to decide what's enough, to give myself permission to rest, to have fun, to not have to be on top of everything, permission to let my boys stand on their own.
But these simple thoughts have also created so much anxiety, frustration, resentment, guilt, and frankly overwhelm, exhaustion, because what I did was frankly never enough. I just didn't realize that that was a decision I was making. The key to unraveling that big black ball is to start with one strand, to be curious in one small area of your life, to understand where you have control and where you don't, and ask yourself that question, what's holding me back from making the decision I really want to make here? This is the key to unraveling that overwhelm and actually deciding to create peace instead.
Unraveling that ball is the work we do in my one-on-one coaching program, MOM 2.0. Understanding the lens that you bring to your life that's driving your emotional experience and holding you back from deciding how to move forward. You just start with one strand. Until next time.
Don't forget to register for Creating Peace Over the Holidays on November 19th. The link to register is at www.thesmalljar.com forward slash one obstacle. See you there.
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.
