Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to Outnumbered the Podcast. I'm Audrey. And I'm Bonnie. We are experienced moms to a combined total of 19 children. In our weekly episodes, we explore relatable topics using our perspectives of humor and chaos. Tune in for advice and encouragement to gain more joy in your parenting journey.
Speaker: Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode. Today we are going to be talking about a super exciting concept, and that is the concept of success. We all want to be successful, right? But specifically how to not get in our own way of success. So I think that's going to be the most important part is that second half. But first, Audrey has something funny to share with us.
Speaker: It's one of those things that your kid says that's funny and it just is so cute and so funny. And then because we have a big family, some of the older kids thought it was extra funny and they made it even funnier. So one of those times. So I was making some whipping cream to put on top of hot chocolate that I was making the kids all fancy and everything. And my two -year -old is sitting over there and he says, I want that, I want that, I want that liquor thing. He's like when, you know, he wants the, you know, the beer. He wants to lick it when he's done. I want that liquor thing.
Speaker: And so my 13 year old stand in there and she goes, honey, I'm pretty sure you're too young to drink liquor.
Speaker: That's what she hears. That's so funny. And I also think it's funny that clearly he knows what that thing is for and it's not for beating whipped cream, it's for licking the whipped cream, right? The number one purpose of a beater is to consume the deliciousness that's on it. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, that's adorable. All right, so when we talk about the word success, we don't often think of that in relation to motherhood and what we're doing day to day, right? It conjures up images of like,
Speaker: a fancy speedboat and nice cars and making lots of money and growing a business or something. But I really feel like there is a way for us to be successful as mothers as well. So I want to kind of explore what that looks like being successful as a mom.
Speaker: Yes, it might, like our definition of success, each one of us, it might look different, but it will involve largely us living up to our most prized values. So what do we value? And if we can do that and achieve that and live like that, then we consider that success. For us, Bonnie and I, these values includes things like
Speaker: patience, extraordinary measures of love for our kids, no matter what they do to us, understanding, consistency. Some of these things that we talk about regularly on the podcast, that's what makes us feel successful as mothers at the end of the day.
Speaker: Right, right. And you, if you've been around for a while, you probably know that Audrey and I are really into exploring these future visions of ourselves, right? Just kind of peeking into the future. What do we want that to look like so that we know that we're on the right path headed in the right direction, right?
Speaker: So just take a minute. Let's do this little exercise. I mean, be careful if you're driving and listening. But if you have a chance to just stop for a second and think about that future version of yourself, what do you want it to look like? You could even tell yourself physically, what does that person look like? What is she wearing? How does she speak? How does she react when things don't go as planned?
Speaker: How does she communicate when she's frustrated or angry? What do her loved ones think of her and how would they describe her, right? So all these things that might give us a little hint into who this wonderful person is and how we can put ourselves on the path to becoming her. Right. And what's really important here is you defining this for you. So if you think about like a successful
Speaker: How is that picture just in general in like in a magazine? What is a successful business woman look like? What is she wearing? How is she posed? What is her story that the article is about? You know, that kind of thing. So then let's switch that to motherhood too. What does a successful mother look like? What's she wearing? What's she doing? And just kind of, you know, well,
Speaker: side note, it's pretty interesting to think about what the difference between those two would look like just according to the person writing the article. But really what matters here is what we think, what our definition of success is. And so if you're not driving, jot those thoughts down or sketch out a picture or write that article yourself. What does that successful mom magazine, that glossy two -page spread, what does that look like? What does it say?
Speaker: Or, you know, don't, you don't have to get that elaborate, just make a note in your phone, whatever. But the point here is that we're not going to reach success, whatever that means to us, if we're unclear of what that looks like. So if we don't define it for ourselves, if we don't have an idea or, or even if we're accepting other people's definition of success for motherhood, for us, like we're not going to achieve that.
Speaker: Yes, totally. I'm glad you brought that up. Yeah, in addition to that, maybe a slightly more morbid thought is what would people be saying at your funeral, right? My husband just had the chance to go to a funeral of one of his friend's siblings who sadly passed away too young, but he said it was just such an uplifting experience to just hear how people reminisced about this wonderful man and how his family remembered him and how his siblings remembered him and
Speaker: all these wonderful things and makes you just reflect on your day -to -day life. Am I doing the things that will cause someone to react and describe me in a similar way? Am I focusing on those things that I really value most?
Speaker: likely could look vastly different for you than for me or for Audrey, but you know what it is, right? And are you headed in that direction, right? Okay. So we're going to shift gears a little bit to talk about the roadblocks to the success. So we're not going to sit and describe what it should look like for you because it's going to be a little bit different for each woman.
Speaker: But we have noticed that we ourselves can often become our largest problems, like biggest roadblocks on this path to success. So how do we prevent ourselves from sabotaging us in getting to that future version of ourselves? We are going to share five ways specifically that we and many moms we know are often guilty of sabotaging their own success and they may not even know it.
Speaker: Right. Before we start into these five, I had a couple of thoughts just to explore. It's interesting you sit down and explore the reason why we would sabotage our success, like consciously or subconsciously. Why does somebody sabotage their success, like their success? So what are they afraid of?
Speaker: Why, just in general, would somebody sabotage something they saw as success? Well, you think about this, and we're not going to really dive into it deep here, but things like fear. So what are you afraid of, of being successful as a mother? Why is that stopping you? So that's kind of when you explore that a little bit, that's interesting to think about as we dive into these five ways that we've found that we sabotage our success. So we're talking about the how,
Speaker: and not the why, but go ahead and please spend some time exploring the thought of why you would sabotage your own success. Okay. Number one, this is, you know, if you were going to guess, if you've listened to the podcast for a while, you'd probably guess this as number one. It's our runaway or uncontrolled thoughts, which then
Speaker: provide feelings for us. So what are the thoughts that we have about ourselves as mothers and about our success as mothers? What are we telling ourselves? What are the sentences in our brain that are keeping us from being successful? Like we sabotage that success before we even get started on that. So just one thing
Speaker: Here I'm not going to give any examples because your sentences are maybe different from my sentences, but they're all sentences that keep us from getting to success. But we want to, we want to take, what we want to do is like, maybe you struggle as much as we do with these thoughts and sabotaging your own success this way. And so one thing we thought here was if we can just teach our kids
Speaker: young about this whole concept of controlling their feelings by controlling their thoughts. And we have to be an example of this. So just one thing, maybe, you know, your kid struggles at something, let's say art, they try to draw a picture and it's not what they wanted it to look like. And so they say, I'm not good at art. I'm no good at art. I'm never going to be able to get art. I'm never going to be a good artist. Like my kids say that all the time, right? I'm not good. I can't do this. I'm not good. And so we can teach them to change that sentence to
Speaker: I want to be good at art, or I want to get better at art, or I'm going to practice so that I can do better. Or at least I tried. Hey, I'm on my way because I made the first drawing. I started. And so think about the ways that the sentences that you have in your brain that are making you just give up before you even start trying. Like what are those, usually the sentences for me start with, I'm never, or I'm not, or I can't.
Speaker: Yes. Yes, they are very closed -ended, right? They are
Speaker: these impossibilities, right? And they make it sound like there's no way around it. You couldn't possibly figure out a way through. And so your brain just shuts down because you gave permission to stop thinking and stop looking for solutions, right? So we have started teaching this responsibility for our thoughts and feelings quite a bit here in our home. And it is pretty magical. In fact, the other day, my 12 -year -old was doing something annoying and it was
Speaker: We try not to say making someone scream, but it was. She was doing something annoying and the four -year -old was screaming because of it. And so I turned around, I said, would you please stop making her scream? And my 12 -year -old, bless her, comes back with, I thought you said nobody could make anybody do anything, mom. I thought you said that she's choosing to scream.
Speaker: that she is choosing to scream, but she does not have the capacity to stop and think her way through it. You do. So I expect better of you. She is still learning. But I thought, well, good. She's learning. She's learning that nobody can make you get angry. You get to choose whether or not it's getting angry. But we try to do this through examples and our own actions, obviously, right? If I catch myself saying something like that, like,
Speaker: Oh, you guys are just making me so crazy. I'll try to backpedal and say, I am allowing myself to lose control today because I have a lot of stressors, and this is why I'm sorry. I'm yelling and blaming you. Could we please tone down the noise a little bit? That would help me to think through my problems today, something like that. But man, thoughts for mothers are key. If you have not analyzed your thoughts yet, you're probably in for a big surprise. When I started doing this, I was just
Speaker: flabbergasted at how many times I was shutting my brain down by giving it permission to just give up by saying, well, I'm a terrible mother. Well, I screamed today. I give up because I did this thing I didn't mean to do. We just have got to hold ourselves to a higher standard. And it will actually get easier and make life better when we become experts at this. So absolutely, that's number one for sure. Yeah. There's a really helpful
Speaker: profile on Pinterest, a mom who helps you think about what thoughts you're having, which are very common mom thoughts and how to change those into different thoughts. And so we'll, I think her name is Tessa Romero, but we'll go ahead and link her in the show notes. Yes, yes, for sure. Okay, so number two would be when we find that we are feeling disconnected to our children. And this happens to me probably on a daily basis if I'm not watching out for it. And what I mean is that
Speaker: When you're a full -time mom or even a most of the time mom, even if you part -time work out of the home, it requires a lot of you mentally and emotionally. And so if we're not careful, we can allow a lot of buffering and distractions to come into our lives and separate us from our kids. So for example, it's lunchtime.
Speaker: I know everyone's hungry. Everyone is screaming. The baby needs to be fed. All these things are coming at me at once. And so what do I do? I sit down and scroll on my phone because my brain just cannot handle one more thing, right? And so I choose to just completely disconnect myself to give my brain a break.
Speaker: Now, there are very conscious and helpful ways to find the breaks that you need, and we'll talk about those in a second. But when you default to those distractions, it really only disconnects you from your children and what's going on, and it will
Speaker: chances are good it will make you more frustrated. It will be easier to lose your temper. It won't just make things worse. I don't know if you've ever had that happen where all of a sudden you're like tapping out, sit down, scroll on your phone, and then kids come up and start tapping you and then you just lose it, right? Because you're just trying to zone out for five seconds and they just still need you, right? Our brain really does need a break when these things get crazy, but we're going to talk about being really intentional about it.
Speaker: Yeah. Okay, so think about this again in terms of success, aiming towards success. So if success to you is a good connection with your children, a meaningful connection, so that your relationship with your children now and in the future is a good one, if that's important to you, then these things that happen to us when we disconnect, when we tap out,
Speaker: they're not helping us get to that success. Like we're sabotaging our success by these things we do. And hey, we get it. We know what it's like to be touched out. Like you just help, so help me. If anybody else touches me, I'm going to get up on top of the refrigerator for like 10 minutes so nobody can reach me and touch me again.
Speaker: Yeah. But again, think about it from your kid's point of view. How would we feel if we were only getting half of attention or distracted attention from someone whose attention was really very important to us? Okay, your husband, you're trying to tell him something that happened and it was distressing you and he's scrolling his phone.
Speaker: You'd be like, okay, buddy, listen. It's laughing out of his hand. I may have done that. I know. I know. But we have to keep in mind that the things that our kids need our attention for right now, right now, the stupid little, hey, mom, mom, mom, mom, look, look at me do this. And they need to show you how they can spin on one foot. And you're just like, oh my gosh, I've never seen this before in my life.
Speaker: But that's so important to them. They just discovered this new skill, this new thing they can do. And even though we have seven other kids that have showed us that they can spin on one foot before, we've got to be there and make that connection with them when it's their turn to show us they can spin on one foot too. Our little problems are so important to us.
Speaker: And their little problems are pretty important to them, too. The difference is that they're developing. And the way that we interact with them, the way that we connect with them or not, is going to affect their development for the future. So it's not quite as mindless as it seems to us sometimes. So yeah, definitely. Sometimes you're just like, OK, I got to zone out for a second.
Speaker: What can we do that is not hurting that relationship with our kids? How can we tap out? One example for me is if I'm just like, hey, don't touch me. Nobody else touch me. I say, okay, everybody go outside. Let's have a race. They're definitely going to beat me to wherever we're racing to so that nobody's hanging on me for even 10 seconds because they're racing ahead of me to beat me wherever.
Speaker: just some deep breathing intentional inhale and exhale and and I do a lot of yoga and so I've learned some very restorative ways of breathing they call ocean breathing and you actually listen to the sound of your breathing so if you can just tap into that for just for just two breaths you know two inhales two exhales it's a very calming thing just stop for a second and just in your mind say a quick prayer just
Speaker: help me. Even two words, just help me. I've read a lot of those. Help me first. It does. It helps. And then like, if I'm not touched out and I have a kid having a meltdown, something that's very helpful to me and to them is skin to skin contact. Okay. So take them in my arms, pull up my sleeves,
Speaker: And just get my skin touching their skin, the skin on my arms, touching the skin on their arms. And there's something about, I know I've mentioned this book before, it's called the vital touch, but there is, there are scientific things that happen when skin is touching skin and it's like calming for them and it's calming for me. Um, so that's, you know, that's one thing, like if I got a kid just tapping on my shoulder, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Like if I can just grab.
Speaker: Grab them and just hold their hand or touch them or you know rub their back or something like make that connection Until I have taken my two breaths and then I can you know Interact with them again So those are like a couple in the moment things that really helped me and then two things that I do that take a little more time than I
Speaker: just a second, our daily yoga, which can be as fast as a 20 to 30 minute session, kind of restorative rest time for me. And then creative pursuits, definitely, Ronnie and I have talked on this podcast a lot before about having something else going on. And if it's, you know, even sewing, sewing is a big one for us that like we can
Speaker: When they're showing us how they can spin on one foot, we can be there, we can be connecting, but also we can be like, you know, sewing in the back of our mind. Planning your next project. Uh -huh, that looks great. Oh yeah, what am I going to do now?
Speaker: I will admit sometimes I just need to escape in my mind and while ideally sure we give our kids all our attention and all our energy and all our brain power when they need us sometimes it's just not possible and there's nothing wrong with sitting there
Speaker: and rubbing your son's back who really needs a connection while dreaming of your next project, your home improvement project or the girls' night you're going to have on Friday, it's okay to tap out mentally every now and again. And that's what I usually like to do. I usually like to do my own forced timeouts. So when things get crazy like that, I'll just go, Mom really needs to use the potty. And off I go. And I'll maybe even take a little book and take a little four -minute breather there, depending on how good the book is, maybe a little longer.
Speaker: You know, and realize that you're at a point where you cannot give any more. And before you explode, then just remove yourself. And it's okay to let it be a social media timeout. You really want to scroll Instagram for five minutes? Do it. Set yourself a timer. Go lock yourself away so that at least you're not distracted in front of them, right? They know you're available when you come back. And when you come back, it's pretty miraculous what your brain is capable of once you give it the care it needs. I think, for example,
Speaker: when life is just crazy and I just can't give anymore and then I go on a trip somewhere or even just date night and I come back and it's like I am a whole new person and they want to show me their spinny foot thing and I'm like that's amazing wow you know I'm able to just be this huge cheerleader and this really connecting mom and just love love love all the time um but you know and especially as homeschoolers it is a unique challenge to be with your children 24 hours a day
Speaker: you really have to be aware of your own mental capacity and realize when you're getting close to the edge. Pull yourself back. A couple other ideas that I wanted to share was singing a song. Everybody goes crazy at my house. Sometimes we just start singing a song called Love at Home that we learn at church. It's kind of ironic and we all just laugh because everybody's fighting. But it just kind of breaks the tension and it allows us to laugh together and
Speaker: Sometimes I'll go read something that's uplifting for me or even just pull out a book to read to the kids. It kind of calms the chaos. The point being, make a plan ahead of time of what you're going to do when you get to that point so that you can be a little bit more intentional about your distractions instead of just the default buffering and yelling and whatever else comes when you are tapped out. Yeah. I definitely have to agree that having a good book that you're reading that keeps you engaged and you can just slip away for
Speaker: five minutes and read another couple of pages. That goes a long ways in taking you out of your present situation. Yeah. Okay. Moving on to number three, you might have your values messed up. Something that happens to us often as a mother is we value homemaking over motherhood. So we get, we forget what motherhood means. It's basically those things that we can't pay somebody else to do. So parenting.
Speaker: connecting with our kids, talking with them, loving them, encouraging them, teaching them. You mentioned you go away for a trip and you come back and your kid's spinny foot thing. It's actually cute and adorable to you again. Who else could you pay to think a dumb kid's spinning on their foot? Maybe grandma. That's about it. But what motherhood is not is all those things you could hire somebody else to do. Maybe you don't, but you could hire somebody to mop the floor, do the laundry, clean the dishes.
Speaker: cleaning your toilets, drive the carpool. All those kinds of things are not motherhood. We do them as mothers. They're part of it, but maybe are you placing more value on those things than you are on the things that you've decided back in number one, you've decided what
Speaker: what you value, what is, what does success look like to you? So if you're a business person, just, I'm going to just keep going back to this analogy. If you're a business person and you have goals on your way to success, and then you start focusing on something that's not part of what you've defined as your success, like are you ever going to reach that success? Um, no. Right. Right.
Speaker: You've just adjusted your trajectory just a little bit, just enough that you're never going to reach the goal. It's going to look real similar, but it's not going to get you there. In fact, along with this analogy, what if your husband or you went to work every day?
Speaker: And instead of actually doing your work tasks, you just tidied up your desk all the time. Maybe you mopped the floor of your office, got the windex out, made your windows all shiny, and it's beautiful, but you actually didn't get any work done all day. That's motherhood, you guys. It's so hard to separate the two, especially if you are a full -time stay -at -home mom, because there is so much that is required of you, especially if your kids are little and you're doing almost all of the housework and the meal prep and the cleanup and the diapers and all the thing.
Speaker: That's actually not mothering. Motherhood is a relationship. It's the relationship you have with your child, right? And think if you are the primary stay -at -home parent, think about the parent that's not. Is there a parent that leaves and goes to work? What do they do when they come home? That's probably more true to real parenting, right? Because they are reconnecting with the children when they come home.
Speaker: And maybe you get to do the same thing and you notice that difference, but it's pretty tricky to realize that, oh, I'm just really irritated at my housework right now. I'm not, and I'm taking it out on my kids maybe, right? Maybe I just need a break from mopping. Maybe I just need a break from laundry and I want to go reconnect with my kids.
Speaker: outside playing in the yard or having a picnic or something. And I get it. It is so hard to let those things go. It is so hard to sit down and connect with a child when there is crap all over your floor. It's a real struggle. And that goes back to our thoughts, right? Where we can say, a good mother can have things on her floor. She can also have a beautiful home, but that does not take away from your mothering by allowing there to be a mess or by allowing your kid to just be in his pajamas all day long.
Speaker: the good mothering comes from this really connective relationship that you have with your child.
Speaker: And the truth is, really, if you are a stay -at -home mom, a full -time stay -at -home mom, the vast majority of your day will probably not look like mothering. It will look like household tasks, right? So the trick is to find those times to do the mothering throughout it. Hey, come help me mop the floor and we'll put sponges on our feet and spin around, or let's sit down and talk about your day before you go to bed, because going to bed is kind of largely just another task we have to do, but are we finding those moments to connect with them and to really mother them throughout
Speaker: these everyday jobs that we give ourselves.
Speaker: Yeah, that is true. And I find, for me, maybe this is the root of it for you, too, is usually what others will think of us in our home. Like, for example, it's easier to fake being a good mom when you're, for a little while, when you're around others, oh, hi, honey, you know, you're so sweet to your kids. But there's no way to fake if somebody walks in your door and you have a sink full of dirty dishes or there's junk all over the floor. So, like, you can...
Speaker: But it's easier to, you know, have a clean sink of dishes and a bad relationship with your kid or you'd be yelling at your kid or whatever. Because if you're valuing what others think about the condition of you or your home. But here's here's a way to kind of flip that on your head. What if you valued what your future children will think of your relationship with them more than what people currently think about the condition of your home?
Speaker: So this, this is kind of a big one for me when I really struggle with, because I'm one of those people where clutter, physical clutter kind of affects me emotionally. You know, again, digging into thoughts of that and stuff, but like, I can't sit down and snuggle on the couch with my kids and read them a book if the room is a mess. So to me, I found like a solution here, like let's clean up this room together so that we can sit down and enjoy reading this book together. So when the cleaning,
Speaker: becomes tied to the relationship and improving the relationship and working together. If we work together, then we can play together, that kind of thing. But again, it's not that cleaning your house and doing all that and all the motherhood tasks are wrong. It's the way that you're prioritizing those or the way that you're valuing them or what you're placing more value on, what other people think of your home or what your kids think of your relationship. That's kind of where it's come down to for me.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely. And another thought about that is, you know, when you go back to the values that you outlined at the beginning of what success looks like to you, did anybody include a clean house? I mean, maybe there's nothing wrong with it. It's wonderful if your house is clean. It feels amazing. But generally it's not at the top of the list when people talk about what success as a mother looks like. I mean, again, nothing wrong with it if it is, but generally it has something to do with that relationship, right? And
Speaker: As an example of what your future children will think, I think often about the chores that my mom had us do when we were children. I hated it. It was the worst, right? But she knew that that was going to be really crucial to our success as we grew up. And now as an adult, I look back and think, that had to be so hard to just remind us over and over. And you know that kids don't clean well for many years.
Speaker: So there were many years of her insisting I clean the bathroom, even when I did a poor job. And then I had to go back the next week and try again, right? And as an adult, you're able to see the hard work that went into your own parenting, even when as a child it was kind of the worst, right? And maybe even her guests thought the same. They came in, the bathroom was kind of subpar. They're like, well, it's kind of dirty in here. And yet what was really crucial, what she was trying to do was to teach me this
Speaker: value of hard work, which you did. So number four of these roadblocks to our success as mothers would be sabotaging or neglecting your own self -care or the care of your marriage. So both of these are, they sound like different things, but they really are kind of one and the same, I think. Your physical well -being is pretty obvious how that affects your children, right? If you are dead tired
Speaker: and have zero energy and have been living on nothing but sugar for three days, you're not going to be really available to your children. I think we all know that, right? We've all had babies and then thought, I will never be able to have patience again because I'm so sleep deprived, right?
Speaker: So your physical well -being and emotional and mental, I might add as well, is really, really essential. And your relationship with yourself, right? How can you give love if you don't feel love yourself, if you don't have the right kind of self -image, I guess. But what about that of your spouse? Marriages are really, really important to the children that are in them as well. But why? I've thought a lot about this. What do you think, Audrey?
Speaker: Oh, yeah, I agree. And if this is somehow the first one of our episodes that you're listening to, go find our episodes about marriage and the importance of having a good relationship with your spouse. Studies show, like every study shows, that children from a healthy marriage have the best chance at success. So when you're setting yourself up for success by taking care of yourself and taking care of your marriage, you're setting up your kids for their future success as well.
Speaker: You know, another way that I think about this often is maybe I just am struggling to find it in me to care for myself and my marriage for myself. Like if that's, you know, that's what I'm doing it for. But how do I want my children to care for themselves? What do I want?
Speaker: their marriages to be like, how do I want them to treat their spouses? How do I want their spouses to treat them? Not that I can control any of that, but I can definitely be an example of that because they're going to be watching, listening, learning, and influenced by the way that I'm taking care of myself and the way that I'm taking care of my marriage. And that's going to have a huge effect on them in their future.
Speaker: Yes, absolutely. It's so interesting that you say that. Maybe you just don't have the motivation to do it for yourself, but you can do it for your children. Yeah.
Speaker: And for the single parents out there or those that don't have the chance at a healthy relationship right now, there are plenty of other ways to show the same thing to your children. And that's through other adult relationships, right? If you are dating or you have friends or neighbors, do you show them how to treat people with respect? How to give them the benefit of the doubt? How to address an argument without just talking badly about someone behind their back? There's so many opportunities to show them mature, healthy adult relationships.
Speaker: so that they can go out and find those themselves. What a powerful gift to give your children, right? Yes, totally. Agree. The other thing I wanted to say about the self -care thing is Audrey and I have talked about how you have to fill your cup to
Speaker: to then fill your child's, but I would argue that you don't then pour out of your cup. You only fill their cups from your overflow, right? Yours really needs to stay full all the time because we really know what that feels like to have a diminished cup. You start pouring out a little bit here and there, and all of a sudden you can't do anything anymore. So fill yourself up so that there's an overflow, so that the excess of energy and happiness and love that you have then is able to fill up that of your children's. Don't make yourself a martyr for your kids.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's a great segue also into our last idea for you.
Speaker: is one, I think the biggest probably way that we as mothers can sabotage our success is being disconnected or at odds with God or power, whatever that is in your life. We cannot do motherhood by ourself. We can do this job alone. And if you've listened to this podcast for any episodes at all, you know that Bonnie and I believe that our children, our families, they're gods and he knows
Speaker: better than we do what to do with them. He has a plan for them and probably, honestly, we're kind of getting in the way of him being able to have success in those plans for us and for our children and for our families when we are sabotaging that success through these things that we do ourselves. Yes, I totally believe this is true. Many, many times I have felt so inadequate as a parent to these little people who honestly, you know,
Speaker: You think you know your children, but as they grow up and become teens and adults, you're thinking, I didn't really know you at all. I wouldn't have guessed that you would have been great at this or that. I mean, sometimes we see little inklings of that, like, oh, you always love cars. It's not really a surprise you became an engineer. But many times they turn into these people that are greater than we could have ever hoped. And we think, I don't think I really had much to do with that. You were just your own person. But I will say that I believe that God does know them way better than we probably ever will.
Speaker: And so if we're struggling, we just gotta say, hey, you know, you gotta help me out because I do not know what I'm doing and what is best for this child at this stage. You know, we all make mistakes and this is one area of my life I really don't wanna screw up as being a mother. And so it's essential that I ask and I'm really connected with and in tune with God's will for me and his answers and how he wants me to raise these kids. Yeah, yeah, we have to,
Speaker: have humility to admit that we don't know. We don't know what's best for other people. And then, yeah, the way what this looks like for me is that I begin each day with prayer and asking for God to guide me through the day and help help me guide me in each moment of interacting with the kids. And then it looks like to me at the end of the day, then I get again down on my knees and I ask for forgiveness for
Speaker: the things that I didn't do right, and I didn't know what was best, and I didn't follow his direction, and then start the next day over again. And I've found, for me, that is success in motherhood, that I start every day and end every day on my knees, just asking, begging for help and for forgiveness.
Speaker: Yeah, I love that. So you are opening the day with this request for grace, because you know you're going to mess it up. And then you end the day with just a request for forgiveness, because you know you did mess it up. And you're just going to keep trying until you get right, right. And we just grow a little bit each day, just like our children do. I would also begin the day with the request for grace and guidance. Yes, totally. I would also say that one thing that has really helped me is to do a deep dive into scripture
Speaker: anything uplifting that you really feel draws you closer to God. As I study specifically Christ teachings, I feel like I'm given more power to just be more loving and more patient and more kind. All these values that we said were really important to us at the beginning. That's what gives me the power to do better at that.
Speaker: Just to wrap up, I wanted to say that we do not expect perfection from ourselves or from any mothers around us. And we do not expect success, quote unquote, to look even close to perfect. But it's going to draw us closer to these values that we've talked about, right? It's going to make us feel like we are connected and really, really loving and feeling loved in return.
Speaker: with our children. And sometimes our kids are going to screw up. And they're going to screw up so bad that we're going to wonder what the heck we did wrong. And we're going to cry and wail and be so upset and think we did everything right. And we may have done everything right. And then they chose to do some really dumb things. But if we are constantly searching for this future,
Speaker: self that we've envisioned, we are going to be at peace with our own actions, right? Relationships are tricky. There's only 50 % of it that we can control, right? And the other half is completely in someone else's hands. And that's heartbreaking sometimes, because they do these things that we just boggle the mind, right? But we can control our half. And that's the best we can ask for is to just keep plugging along and eliminating these obstacles that will keep us from that vision of success.
Speaker: Yeah, I wanted to say here that looking at ways we sabotage our own success, that can be really depressing if we just stop at the faults that we find, the ways that we're doing the self -sabotage.
Speaker: That can be like, okay, fine. I'm going to give up. Yep. Wow. So then going back to number one, right? We're not only sabotaging ourselves, but we're saying I'm sabotaging myself. So there's never any hope for trying, but just keep in mind the importance of understanding why we're looking for ways that we engage in self sabotage. That is so that we can make improvements and we can go one step further down that road towards success. And so let's say, um, today,
Speaker: I did one of those five things. Yep. Definitely. I sabotaged my own success today. So tomorrow I want to take one tiny baby step towards success and try again. And am I going to fail and sabotage myself tomorrow as well? Probably.
Speaker: But don't let looking at those, don't let looking for ways to sabotage yourself. Like don't let that be our focus. Let improvement be our focus. And if you are only looking at yourself through the light of rose -colored glasses, wow, I'm perfect. I'm so awesome. Then how are you going to find something to improve? But if we look for ways we're sabotaging ourself with the end goal of being
Speaker: that we can move towards success, then it's a worthy cause. But if you're just going to look at yourself, look for ways you're sabotaging your own success so that you can beat yourself up. I mean, don't, please don't. That's not what this episode is about. Yes, we all know what we're doing wrong, right? But we have lots and lots of hope that with these tips, you can take baby steps forward, right? So good to talk to you guys this week. We will see you next week.
Speaker: Thanks for listening friends. Click the link in the show notes to subscribe to our email and never miss another episode. Show us some love by leaving a review on iTunes or sharing the podcast with a friend. Thanks for all your support. We'll talk to you next week.
