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The Magic of Love and Gratitude: Showing Up Intentionally This Thanksgiving
25 Plays19 days ago
In this special Thanksgiving episode, Leanna invites listeners to embrace gratitude and intentionality amidst the holiday hustle. She shares powerful strategies for managing stress, reframing expectations, and focusing on the moments that truly matter. Drawing on the metaphor of "choosing your lenses," Leanna encourages moms to step back, zoom out, and view their families and the day through love and gratitude. Whether you're hosting, visiting, or navigating holiday chaos, this episode offers practical tips to help you stay grounded and present so you can truly enjoy the day. Happy Thanksgiving!
Full transcript available here.
Connect with Leanna here.
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Transcript
Introduction to Executive Coach for Moms Podcast
00:00:08
Speaker
Welcome to the Executive Coach for Moms podcast, where we support women who are attempting to find balance and joy while simultaneously leading people at work and at home. I'm your host, Leigh Ann Alaski McGrath, former tech exec turned full-time mom, recovering perfectionist and workaholic and certified executive coach.
00:00:32
Speaker
Hi, everyone. Happy Thanksgiving.
Navigating Holiday Joy and Stress
00:00:35
Speaker
I want to make this one short and sweet because I know today might be very scheduled out for you, whether you're doing the rounds to all the family and step family dinners or you're hosting everyone at your house like I am. I know that holidays are kind of two sides of the same coin with lovely family centered memories full of love and joy on one side and stress inducing high pressure, high emotions on the other. So I just want to share a couple of things that I think might help to make the day a little bit less stressful and a little bit more joyful for you. And you can really use this on any day or at any time during the holiday season, but since Thanksgiving happens to fall on a Thursday and I publish new episodes every Thursday, I felt like it made sense to do something special for it.
Self-reflection and Intentional Living
00:01:27
Speaker
So before you get into it, before you join your family, maybe you're listening to this on your morning walk or as you're making mashed potatoes, I would love to invite you just to spend a couple of minutes reflecting and connecting to yourself. I find that taking a few minutes for myself before the hustle and bustle begins always allows me to be more intentional throughout the day. And when I start to lose that intentionality, as I do because I'm a human,
00:01:56
Speaker
I may need to take a few seconds or minutes to myself to kind of drown out the noise, tune back in and recenter myself. So if you find yourself needing that at any point today, please allow yourself a couple of minutes or more to take yourself out of the situation, take some breaths and recenter yourself so that you can show up the way you want to. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that and it's actually amazing.
00:02:22
Speaker
to take care of yourself. So as we all know, today is all about gratitude and giving thanks. So I wanna talk about the magic of it, the magic of gratitude. I think that gratitude has the opportunity to be such a gift whenever we are focusing on it. I think it can also make us feel kind of gaslit and invalidated when people are telling us to constantly be grateful as a way to ignore when things are hard.
00:02:50
Speaker
And I think that like takes it all the way to the extreme. And it's definitely not the kind of gratitude that I want to talk about
Managing Holiday Expectations and Stress
00:02:57
Speaker
today. But the reality is is that at some point during this lovely memory filled holiday that often feels like it's all on our shoulders as moms to make amazing, you're probably going to feel annoyed, frustrated or irritated with someone that you love. That might be your partner, your kids, your mom,
00:03:20
Speaker
your uncle, your in-laws, whoever you're interacting with today or on any day. And you know from listening to this podcast that our thoughts create our feelings. So if you're suddenly feeling rage towards your husband or partner because they were supposed to take the turkey out of the fridge as soon as they woke up and they didn't and now it's thrown off the whole time or if your kids are fighting over the last roll after they've already had five of them, or if they're refusing to eat the lovely meal that you've prepared, or if your mother-in-law is making that comment that she always makes, just know that like these things will probably happen today, some version of them. And I think a lot of times when we imagine holidays, we imagine that those days are different from all the other days. We imagine this like perfect scenario where everybody acts exactly the way we want them to and where we show up as this immaculate perfect version of ourselves and I think we build it up in our mind and it raises our expectations so exponentially high beyond the realm of like what's actually possible and realistic and it's kind of like we're setting ourselves up for failure and it's it's okay we all do this. I just think that it's a lot more enjoyable than imagining the worst case scenarios, although I'm sure our brains are also doing that.
00:04:48
Speaker
I'm planning for that in the background too. But we build up these days and we put so much pressure on ourselves and on all the other characters in our story to play their parts. And when it doesn't go as planned, we often will get angry, frustrated, feel resentful and decide that nobody is grateful for all of our hard work. And we just often don't enjoy the day as much as we can. So if this has ever happened to you, you are not alone. This has happened to me on holidays as well.
00:05:18
Speaker
It's happened to many of the people that I work with, many friends that I've talked to. So here's what I want to suggest. Right now, before everything gets crazy for the day, decide right now how you want
Changing Perspectives with Love and Gratitude
00:05:30
Speaker
to be today. How do you want to show up? Decide how you're going to respond when someone says something frustrating. What thoughts do you want to think whenever this happens? What actions will you take? And most importantly, what is the essence of how you'll show up if you want to describe it in a word or two?
00:05:47
Speaker
one of my words is often calm or equin I never know how to pronounce this equin equanimity is the aura that I try to bring to myself that's kind of how I want to show up so decide ahead of time and here's what I believe helps let's imagine that we have multiple sets of glasses we have a drawer full of sunglasses and actually what prompted this visual for me was last night my daughter actually pulled all of our sunglasses out of our sunglasses drawer and played sunglasses shop with us as we were getting the house ready for Thanksgiving. So we pretended that looking through each pair of sunglasses had different views. And so I want you to imagine that you have multiple sets of glasses or sunglasses and each one shows you a different view. So maybe one set is your annoyed glasses and so everything that you look at
00:06:41
Speaker
annoys the crap out of you. Maybe one set is joyful and everything that you look at causes you to suddenly feel full of joy. One set is scarcity.
00:06:51
Speaker
and everything you look at reminds you that you're not enough, you don't have enough, you don't give enough, you should have tried harder, you should have done better. All of these lenses are available to us and I think often when we're feeling frustrated or annoyed about things, it's just because we're wearing our frustrated lenses. Anayas Nin has a wonderful quote that goes, we do not see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
00:07:19
Speaker
So who will you be today? Which pair of glasses do you want to put on today? And might I suggest if you're contemplating the lenses of love and gratitude. When we are wearing these lenses, we can look at the annoying things that people are doing And we can kind of pay less attention to the behavior or the words and more attention to the person behind them. When we're looking through those lenses of love and gratitude, we can see that person that we deeply love. And when we focus on that, we can feel a greater sense of connection and a lower sense of annoyance or irritation or rage with them.
00:07:55
Speaker
When we are wearing the lenses of gratitude and we look at the dinner table with the kids running around and fighting and chaos everywhere that often drives up our anxiety, we can focus less on all the chaos and more on the gratitude for the most important people in our lives all being in one room together for this beautiful meal that we're about to have together. We can also look at all of those things that we have with love and gratitude, a warm home, electricity, clean water, a nice meal, people who love us. There are so many opportunities to look around through those lenses.
00:08:34
Speaker
and find things that make us feel warm and loving and loved and good and give us those really good feelings that we wanna feel. So decide now which lenses you're gonna wear today.
00:08:48
Speaker
how you're going to look at things and people throughout the day. It's totally up to you. And I think that's the most important thing to recognize is that you get to choose. Nobody else gets to rip off your lenses and put on different ones for you. You choose.
00:09:04
Speaker
how you are looking at things that is 100% within your control and one caveat I just want to throw out there if you are looking at your loved ones and the things you have through this lens for the first time or the first time in a while I think we sometimes have a tendency to then want to beat ourselves up about oh why don't I do this all the time and why don't we do this more often and you know we kind of make it mean something about ourselves and we get into a shame spiral about just how we're not doing it right and we make it mean bad things about ourselves. I just want to invite you to focus on the fact that you're doing it today.
00:09:42
Speaker
And you won't do it perfectly today because you're a human and nobody else is going to do it perfectly today either. But please try to stay focused
Embracing New Perspectives on Gratitude
00:09:49
Speaker
on that and the way that you're looking at things today and not dive into a shame spiral because Lord knows, ain't none of us got time for that today, especially on a holiday. The other thing that's important about these lenses is how wide or narrow they are in scope. I think our loved ones can drive us crazy sometimes, right? We can all relate to that.
00:10:11
Speaker
But when we step back and think about it, you know you love them so much, right? And you're so grateful to have them in your life. And I think that's the key right there, that exercise of stepping back and thinking about it.
00:10:23
Speaker
zooming the lens out. It's really hard to do when you're going through the motions getting through the to do list and there's so much to do and you're just looking at that next task in front of you and thinking about all the things you need to do. When we do that, we have a very narrow scope, but when we can zoom the lens out, step back,
00:10:43
Speaker
when we can ask ourselves questions like, when I'm at the end of my life looking back, what do I want to remember about this day? When I step back and look at my family, what do I love about them? What do I appreciate about this person? And I would invite you to take a little bit of time, just one or two minutes as soon as you're done with this episode, to zoom out and look at your family through the lens of love and gratitude and through that wide lens and ask yourself, what do I love and appreciate about each person?
00:11:12
Speaker
And I know it's going to feel like you don't have time, but I highly encourage you to write down five things about each person, starting with the one you find it most difficult to find, find things about and then refer back as needed. I promise it will help you to show up more in the way you want to show up today.
00:11:29
Speaker
and it will cause you to waste less energy later and therefore time if you take a little bit of time up front. Another benefit of zooming out the lens is that it helps us get more clear on what's important and what's less important because those less important things tend to fade away when we're looking through that wide lens.
00:11:49
Speaker
So often as perfectionists and high achievers, we want to make sure that everything is perfect, every little component. But I think zooming the lens out allows us to ask ourselves, what do I want my kids to remember about this day? I promise. And I think as you know, they are way less likely to remember the perfect sweet potato casserole that you made. And they're way more likely to remember their mom being present and enjoying them on Thanksgiving and laughing and having a good time. They're not going to remember the perfect place setting, but they will remember you delighting in their presence. So today, and honestly every day really, I invite you to be intentional about which glasses you select, which lenses you're putting on, and what you're choosing to focus on. Ask yourself, how do I want to show up today? What do I want to remember about today? What do I want my kids to remember about today? And what do I appreciate about each of my loved ones?
00:12:42
Speaker
I am so incredibly grateful to you listener for supporting this podcast and for hopefully letting it help you show up in the way you want to so that you can live a life that you love. That is my wish for everyone that we create the lives we want to live and we can do that by intentionally deciding each day how we want to show up so we can live our best
Conclusion: Intentional Living and Gratitude
00:13:03
Speaker
lives. Happy Thanksgiving everyone and thank you so much for tuning in.
00:13:09
Speaker
Thanks so much for tuning in to the Executive Coach for Moms podcast. Please like, subscribe, or follow the show so you'll be notified when the next episode is available. I hope you'll join me again next time. Take care.