Empowerment

I looked up the definition of empowerment on the internet today. It says, to make (someone) stronger and more confident, especially in controlling their life and claiming their rights. I love this definition! So many of us are walking around giving our power away! Maybe it’s to our kids thinking thoughts like, “I can make it through today as long as nobody fights.” Or maybe we hand it over to our husband, “if he would just tell me I’m doing a good job once in a while, then I’d feel like enough.” Or maybe it’s the weather, or the number in the scale, or a relationship that’s not perfect, the list goes on and on. We look outside of ourself so often for that validation and love we all crave. The only problem is we usually end up waiting on someone else to change before we can feel better. But what if you could be empowered? What if instead of falling victim to your own life you chose to have your own back? How would things be different? Better? Coaching shows you that all of that’s available to you right now without anything changing at all. Also, this doesn’t mean the end goal is to be happy robot all the time, it just means to be deliberate and intentional with your thinking all while being human and experiencing all of it! The good, the bad, and the ugly. 

Italy

Tonight I was supposed to be on a plane flying over the ocean to Italy. I’ve never been outside the country before. It was a trip we had planned for nearly a year. We had everything figured out. We were pumped and ready until this virus hit and changed everything. Pretty sad story right?  life is just plain disappointing! Or is it? The truth is it’s entirely up to us how we want to feel and even the story we choose to tell about our life. Sometimes in life we want to feel disappointed, sad, angry, or frustrated, and that’s totally fine!  But if we don’t want to feel that way, it’s totally up to us to change the story. Which is the best news ever! I mean maybe instead of being disappointed I could decide to be grateful. Grateful that we didn’t get stuck over there for months without a way to come home. Grateful that we are all healthy. And so grateful we were able to get our money back and reschedule. I know we will make it to Italy someday and that life will get back to normal for all of us eventually. It’s my opinion that the universe has our back. Things always pan out the way they’re supposed to and for our personal benefit. We just need to hang on for the ride!

Coronavirus

 Tonight we drove around our small town to grab a treat since it’s Friday and it’s tradition. It was a ghost town you guys! Normally restaurants and businesses are busy on the weekends. Instead there were little to no cars in parking lots, and lots of businesses closed early in order to slow the curve on the Coronavirus. People are staying home. Life is completely different. No more church, home school for kids, and little to no social interaction. Meanwhile the news is literally talking about nothing else except this novel virus. How are you feeling about all of this? Most friends and neighbors I’ve talked to are scared. I’m scared too. I think that’s completely normal. You see, our brains are always on the look out for a problem to solve. And the worst kind of problem for the brain is one that isn’t able to be solved. Which is what we’re all dealing with right now. No one actually knows what the future holds for us. They can predict. But no one really knows. So we go to the news and any other source we can to try to solve this problem. We think that if we just gather enough information we will figure out a way to move on and feel better. The issue here is that all of the news being thrown at us is only causing us to feel more and more negative emotion. But what if instead we all tried to look at today. What if we gave our brain a problem that it actually could solve? Instead of focusing so much on the news and fear, let’s limit our exposure and only listen to the experts, follow what they say, and then move on. I believe things will get better. I don’t know how or when so for now I’m doing my best to focus my brain on problems it can solve. It’s not easy but it feels a lot better than fear.

Emotions are nothing to fear

I’m currently enrolled in the Life Coach School and classes start in t-minus two weeks! This has been something I’ve wanted to do for a long time but now that just happening my brain has been straight trippin boo! I’ve been feeling a lot of different emotions, both positive and negative. But here’s the thing about emotions. They really aren’t anything to fear. They are just vibrations in your body created by your thoughts. They can come and go if we allow them instead of pushing them away. And trust me! I’m the queen of resisting emotion. I’ve gotten better now that I know it’s my thoughts that are the cause of everything but I can think of plenty of times when I’ve made things so much worse than they needed to be simply by not being willing to relax and be present with a negative emotion. Here’s an example: I’m someone who really really hates needles. Every time I’ve had to have a shot I tell the person giving it that I’m just going to look away until it’s over. I close my eyes super tight like a 3 year old. Palms sweaty, mouth dry, all of it. What’s funny is the actual prick of the needle is usually a lot less intense than what I make it out to be in my head. I think it’s the same with our emotions. We want so badly to feel good and happy and peaceful in our lives and anytime that feels threatened by a negative emotion we do one of 4 things: we either resist, react, avoid, or accept what we’re feeling. The first 3 options get us nowhere and usually even make the emotion stronger and more uncomfortable. The best possible thing we can do is relax and allow ourselves to feel whatever we are feeling. While also recognizing that the feeling is always coming from a thought. The reason this is all the best news is that when you’re feeling negative emotion it doesn’t mean something is wrong with you or your life. It really just means that you’re human.

Keeping commitments

I want to talk for a minute about the power of keeping commitments to yourself. Recently I’ve decided to change up my morning routine. For the longest time I would wake up and grab my phone and jump right back into social media. I’d spend a good chunk of my day scrolling between taking care of my kids. But for the past couple weeks I’ve decided I’m done with that. Instead I get up and I read my scriptures, write a little in my journal, and exercise. It’s made the biggest difference in my day. I get so much more done and I’m able to focus so much more on my family and much less on what doesn’t matter. But here’s the thing, I don’t say any of this to make anyone feel like they’re doing it wrong. I want you to know that there have been several days where I haven’t wanted to follow through with this new routine. I’ve wanted to just tune everything out and go back to my old “comfortable” ways. But instead of doing that I chose to keep the commitment I’ve made to myself. I remind myself how much better I feel when I take care of me first. When I do the necessary things on purpose. Even when I don’t want to. Even as I type this post my main objective is fulfilling a commitment I made to myself to post at least once a week. It’s now 10:30 at night and we lose an hour tomorrow for day light savings. Most of you who know me know that I don’t go to bed late. Ever. But I made the commitment so I’m trying my best to follow through because it’s an important skill that I’m trying to develop. So next time you say you’ll do something and it turns out you really don’t want to... do it anyway. You’ll be glad you did.

The Manual

I used to think about the relationships in my life very differently than I do now. I used to think that something had gone majorly wrong because the people in my life weren’t acting the way I thought they should be. I would ask questions in my head like “Why don’t my kids just listen the first time when I ask them to do something?? They SHOULD totally do that right??” Or “Why doesn’t my husband naturally buy me the perfect thoughtful gift that I always wanted for my birthday?” That’s what happens in all the movies right? Good husbands should totally do that! But you know what all that drama created for me? Disconnection. When we try to control the people in our lives instead of letting them just be themselves it creates tension and resentment and a whole lot of other negative emotions. Most of the time the person that we’re trying to change has no idea what our expectations even are. When we act this way it’s as if we have a manual for the people around us. A way that we believe they should act and be in order to be acceptable for us. The major problem is that people are going to do whatever the heck they want to! And the only real person you have control over is YOU! So how do you want to feel about your life? Did you know it’s entirely up to you to decide? 

I’ve found that it feels SO much better to allow my husband and children to simply behave the way husbands and children behave naturally. So when my kids don’t come running the first or second or tenth time I call them I can realize that they’re just kids being totally 100% normal! They’re really not supposed to just be weird robot kids that do whatever I ask whenever I ask it. And when my husband does his best to show me he cares in his own way I can just be SO grateful he’s mine! Instead of wondering if something has gone wrong. It truly is up to me! 

What are you making it mean?

For the past two weeks my husband has been doing a job in Bear Lake, about an hour from where we live. He gets home about the time I put the kids to bed. Needless to say it’s been rough. I’ve had a lot on my plate and not a lot of time for myself. Which is totally okay! Just hard. The real reason I want to share this story is that the other night I totally 100% lost my SHIZZ! My basement had been a total mess for days and earlier that day my kiddos were not helping me clean it up at ALL! Then later my oldest got himself stuck nearly to his knees in thick, soupy, MUD! Just the thought of cleaning any of it was just too much. So I yelled and I screamed and said a bunch of things I’m not proud of. I also slammed our pantry door shut at one point which accidentally cracked a freaking hole in the door! No joke! Not at all my finest hour. But here’s the real question. What am I making ALL of that mean?? On the one hand I could decide I’m the worst mother in the world. Some of you might even be thinking that as you read. I could tell myself my kids will never turn out, that they’re going to become criminals, and worst of all it’s all my fault! This is the easy route that my brain naturally wants to take because it’s a human brain that’s super good at pointing out things that are wrong. But what’s the upside to thinking all of that? Those thoughts just leave me feeling sad, defeated, and in a huge pit of self loathing. But what if instead I decided to make all of that drama mean that I’m HUMAN. That I make mistakes but that I totally love myself anyway. What if instead I used it as an opportunity to teach my kids about forgiveness and what it means to be sorry? That’s an option too right? And I’m telling you my friends! It’s a much BETTER option! So next time some drama goes down for you, be careful what you make it all mean.