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Joyful Acceptance or Lower Your Expectations {Episode 214 - Outnumbered the Podcast}
594 Plays2 years ago
You've probably heard us mention our tagline "lower your expectations" a time or two!?! As moms to 9 and 10 kids, we know what it means to reconcile unrealistic expectations in a way the leaves us with joy. If things in your life are not the way you hoped they would be and you can't figure out why you're not happy, this episode is for you! We're talking to our younger selves about lowering our expectations so we can joyfully accept and enjoy our current lives!
Mentioned in this episode:
Episode 166: What I'd tell a younger me about a messy house
About Outnumbered the Podcast:
About Outnumbered the Podcast:
Two moms, parenting a combined total of 19 kids and finding joy in the chaos.
Join Audrey and Bonnie as they share real parenting tips for real people through humor, advice and compassion.
Whether it's tackling how to teach kids to work or discussing where to turn when you're all out of patience,
these two experienced moms are here to offer authentic tips for raising children joyfully.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Joyful Acceptance
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome back to Outnumber the Podcast, episode 214, joyful acceptance, i.e. lowering your expectations. If you've been around a while, you know that we love to talk about this tagline because it brings us so much more joy when we can let go of that ideal that sometimes we just can't make it to. Today, we're going to talk about two main steps in getting to this place of joyful acceptance of the life that you currently live. First one is awareness of what's going on inside your mind, and the second one is acceptance of the things that you cannot change. So let's dive in.
Meet Audrey and Bonnie
00:00:35
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.
Core Concepts of Joyful Acceptance
00:00:59
Speaker
Hello, friends. Welcome back to the podcast. We love this topic we're talking about today. We are calling it Joyful Acceptance, but that is our pretty name for lowering your expectations. We figured that this tagline of the podcast deserved its very own episode finally. If you've been around for a while, you know that we talk about this a lot, and we're going to talk about why this is important and rename it Joyful Acceptance because that's just pretty.
00:01:27
Speaker
When really we're just lowering our expectations. It's pretty great. Oh my goodness. That is so true. So the other day my 20 year old was baby sin for me.
00:01:40
Speaker
She was telling me this story when I came back because I had to go do all the things and I came back. It's easier to do all the things when you don't have to take all the toddlers with you. So I come back and I was like, how'd it go? And she's like, well, fine. And I said, okay, what? And she says, well, the toddler went out into my room. We have a little shed out back and that's her little,
00:02:04
Speaker
She goes to college and so she's got to have her own space and all that. So she's out in the little, little bunkhouse outside. And she said, he went out into my shed and he found my snacks for college that I eat to keep my blood sugar up so I can pay attention. And he got into them and he took one and he hid it in the sandbox.
00:02:24
Speaker
And then about two hours later, he was hungry. So he went and dug it out of the sandbox and opened and ate it. So I have no clue if he's going to be okay or not. And I asked him, I said, why did you do that? Why did you get into my shed? And why did you bury it in the sandbox? And why did you eat it later? And he says, um, I don't want to talk about that right now. Which sounds like something he stole right from mom's mouth. I'm not going to talk about that right now.
00:02:54
Speaker
I'm not interested in that conversation. That is hilarious. Okay. Just out of the mouth of babes, we're going to do a double whammy today because I forgot something my five-year-old said the other day that you guys would love. So we were in the car and she was singing or doing something annoying. And her older brother said, Alice, if you don't stop that, I'm going to beat you up. And he's mostly kidding, of course. But she just looked back at him and went, oh yeah, try it.
00:03:23
Speaker
Which is just on par for her personality. It was like, oh yeah, I'd like to see you try to pull that one off. They are just so funny. Oh my goodness. My two that are about those same ages, same age as your oldest and then five. They have a really good, funny relationship too. And they're always trash talking each other like that. And I'm like, you know what, sweetheart? You have to learn that not every 17-year-old male in your life is going to respond to you like this.
00:03:51
Speaker
Yeah, and they're both boy girls too, which is kind of funny too. Yeah, maybe it's just kind of like this little banter. Yeah, that's cute.
Steps to Joyful Acceptance
00:03:58
Speaker
Okay, so back to the topic at hand. As I'm learning more about managing my mind, what I'm learning is that there are two major steps to kind of leaning into the greatest possibility for my life, right? And those two steps are two A's, easy to remember, awareness and acceptance. So we're talking today about all the things in your life that are not the way you would like them to be, that cause some conflict, right? Awareness and acceptance are key.
00:04:23
Speaker
Oh my goodness. Like how is it that we can go through life so unaware? Well, I know how it is because we all have like a toddler hanging off one leg and we're carrying a baby in the other and we're like trying in our head to sort laundry and figure out what time supper's supposed to be in and what are we going to have for supper anyway?
00:04:41
Speaker
That's how we can go through life so unaware of what's going on in our own selves because we have so much that we have to pay attention to that's going on around us. But we do have to pay attention to those stories in our mind. We have to just pause, find a quiet place, listen to what we're thinking because
00:05:02
Speaker
because it's going to help us or hinder us and make everything else that we're doing easier or harder. So we listen to our mind, we pay attention to the stories our mind is telling us, and then we accept the results that we've created or we accept that we have created results based on those stories. And so we either accept that or we decide we're going to tell new stories, make new results.
00:05:26
Speaker
It's so important to do this because going back to what I said, it will make our life easier or harder, those stories that are inside our head. Yes, absolutely. This is kind of a funny analogy, but I'm going to give an analogy that I know all you moms, if you have physically carried a baby and birthed one, then you will understand this analogy. But learning to listen to and pay attention to your thoughts is kind of like retraining your pelvic floor.
00:05:56
Speaker
I'm a word analogy, but stick with me.
00:05:58
Speaker
They are muscles that we don't even know exist before we carry children. And then all of a sudden we're like, oh, that doesn't work. Or, oh, what was that? Right? We have to learn about a portion of our body that we didn't even really know was correctly being used until it does not work anymore. And then we have to retrain how to use those muscles. Sometimes we even have to have surgery to put things back together. Right? All of a sudden we're very aware about a part of our body that we didn't even know was there before.
00:06:27
Speaker
And controlling your brain is the same way. So many people go throughout their entire life never even acknowledging that they are the masters of their own fate. They are creating their own reality from these sentences in their mind. But once you get aware of that and you start paying attention to those sentences, you're like,
00:06:46
Speaker
Oh, that was there. Oh, I didn't know. And you're able to retrain it and rehab it and maybe even do some little surgery in there to try to get rid of some of these thoughts that are not serving us. So there's my weird analogy for paying attention because it might be tricky at first, the first couple of times you try to like clench those muscles, you're like, I don't know if I'm doing this right. But then you get in the habit of it and you start paying better attention to that.
00:07:13
Speaker
Oh my goodness. You know what? That is such a cool analogy because it works, but also it's going to stick in our audience's mind. When they're doing their Kegels, they're going to like, oh yeah, and I also have to control my mind. Totally, totally.
00:07:31
Speaker
We could carry this analogy through the episode, but for right now we're done. We'll stop for now. That's a good one though, let's be honest. Oh my goodness. So we loved, like I mentioned before, we love to talk about keeping our expectations realistic. Instead of calling them low, let's just call them realistic, right? Because as moms, we need to acknowledge that so much is out of our control, really as a human being, so much of what you encounter every day is out of your control, your kid's behavior.
00:08:01
Speaker
your husband's attitude, the weather, what the house looks like, whether or not the heater is working and on and on and on, the dog pee and the kid barf and all the things that are out of your control. Managing those expectations is huge for taking what life throws at you and maintaining the kind of emotional resilience that you wanna have. Yes, there is actually only one thing in our control.
00:08:28
Speaker
that we definitely have control over. And that's how we approach the whole thing and process it in our minds. We can't control all these things that are going on inside our own house. We can influence them, but we can't control them. We can set the right atmosphere or a good atmosphere, the atmosphere we want to affect these other things. But the only thing we can actually control is what's inside the old noggin right there.
00:08:53
Speaker
That's right, that's right. And I know we've talked about this before, but it is exciting news. If you want to feel empowered and change your life, it's also devastating news if you're used to blaming other people. Because that feels really good to be like, if the kid's and the dog and the husband would just behave better, life would be a lot easier. But that's not, in fact, the case, right? So this is, like I said, even though we notice it a lot as moms, this is great practice for every aspect of our life, right?
00:09:20
Speaker
I in general want to be the kind of person that can look at a world that is messed up, where bad things are happening and many things seem to be going awry and still show up as someone who is full of faith and joy because of how I choose to think about it. Yes, that is awesome because controlling our own thoughts and our own behavior is
00:09:46
Speaker
such a good example to set for others who we want to influence.
Mental Awareness and Acceptance
00:09:50
Speaker
Okay, let's talk about that first thing, awareness. So what sentences does your brain have on repeat? This is kind of hard to tune into, but once you kind of step outside your own brain and you start watching and listening,
00:10:09
Speaker
to what the sentences are going on in there, it's kind of interesting. And we can like, like you said at first, sometimes when we see these sentences in our brain, we can be like really upset because we can see they all kind of have a trend. So they all kind of disempower us, make us a victim,
00:10:35
Speaker
or blame other people, right? It's all this disempowering stuff. And that can be kind of really hard to deal with at first. Yeah, I will say that actually my initial thought when I was thinking about this episode was that most of mine are towards blame. But that's only because I've gotten over a lot of the shame issues. Because for many years, my thoughts tended toward shame. Those are the two that play back and forth, right? I would blame myself and what's wrong with me, et cetera. And now I've worked through a lot of that. So instead, I just blame everybody else around me, right?
00:11:04
Speaker
And some of the thoughts that come up with me repeatedly are things like, oh, these kids are such slobs. Why is he like this? She drives me so crazy. I just wish that he or she would... So what I'm doing is, and generally this comes because I've seen a circumstance that I do not like, let's say a mess in the house. I go to clean it up and I choose to fuel my cleanup with thoughts like, these kids are such slobs.
00:11:33
Speaker
Whereas maybe years ago, it would have been, gosh, I can't keep up on this house right now. Now I've chosen to shift it over into blame, but it's still very disempowering, right? And obviously, when we start to inspect that, we realize, oh, I'm taking all my potential happiness and just dropping it in my kid's laps and their potential for cleaning up a room. Yeah, that's not going to work out well for me, right? I can't be happy and content if I continue to give away that power to the lowest common denominator, the kid that's making the biggest mess.
00:12:04
Speaker
Yeah, what you wanna watch out for is words like never, like absolute words that are just so disempowering. I'm never going to, or they're never going to, right? These absolutist words that kind of automatically put us into a defeat mentality. When we're waiting for others to change their actions before we can be truly happy, that's putting our happiness in other people's laps. And spoiler alert,
00:12:33
Speaker
If they change their actions and everything did what your mind is telling them would cause happiness, your mind would keep on going. And it would find something else that's gone wrong so that it could keep up this loop of negativity. It's kind of like a primitive survival mechanism to keep looking for the harm and the wrong and those kind of things. I don't know how to describe it beyond that.
00:13:02
Speaker
Maybe that makes sense. I think it's also something to do with just our brain wanting to feel good. You know, we get this little hit of dopamine when I see a clean house or see a kid behaving in a certain way that I agree with. Right. And so the brain is like, oh, I want to feel like that. I want to feel that. Right. But we actually can get to feel that way even without kids doing all their chores on time. We get to just choose. Right. But handing that over to somebody else for some reason feels
00:13:29
Speaker
more intuitive. It's harder work to hold on to it ourselves, right?
00:13:34
Speaker
Yeah. I remember one time we talked about in a previous episode, we talked about how when we are feeling these negative emotions and we use blame, it's like letting off a little bit of steam. So the pressure isn't so great in our own selves, like, like, you know, blaming somebody else. That's like taking the focus off of the negative emotion in us that's causing us to feel that way. And it's, it doesn't fix anything, but it lets off a little steam.
00:14:01
Speaker
It just lets off a little pressure so that we can keep on going and it never, like it never fixes, never gets fixed.
00:14:08
Speaker
Right. Right. Yeah. So watch out for that. It's just, it's, and none of this should cause us any like judgment or we shouldn't get angry at ourselves for thinking this way, but just to be super interested in it. And like, Oh, listen, every time I clean up the house, my brain goes to these kids are such slobs. I wonder what that's about. I just really like to call my kids names. What's going on? You know, do I really, do I really expect them to keep up better than we are? You know, just kind of probe a little bit, figure out what's going on in there.
00:14:38
Speaker
That's all part of the awareness thing is to listen, be aware of what's going on. Just like if you're going to shut yourself down, oh, I'm such a bad person for thinking these thoughts. Well, that's not going to fix anything, but it's just the act of listening. That's the first step. Just listen, be aware, just listen.
00:14:57
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So number two, after the awareness, we need to come to a place of acceptance. So changing these like mental tracks that are going through our head, you know, songs we play on repeat can bring us to a place where we can learn to love what we have and stop fixating on what we don't. And what a miraculous place that can be, right? Just acceptance of what is.
00:15:19
Speaker
Ooh, that's kind of hard though. If we don't get to change anything, we just have to accept it the way it is. But when we're thinking different thoughts about it, that helps us to accept. So we're not, when we become aware of the bad thoughts, we don't have to, we're not accepting the bad thoughts. We're aware of the bad thoughts, the negative thoughts, the disempowerment, and that's what we can,
00:15:48
Speaker
like start working on it. This, you know, our tagline, lower your expectations or joyful acceptance. It can be, it can be tricky because once you've just come, you've lowered your expectations a little bit and you've come to the acceptance that, okay, my, you know, my living room is never going to be in the condition that I want it to, whatever. Then you have another child or your kids get to a different age where, you know, your toddler is now
00:16:18
Speaker
Walking, toddling instead of crawling and everything has to like, you go into another stage and you've got to readjust all over again. Lower those expectations again or come to acceptance again. And it can be tricky because it's a regular process. It's not just accepting things once or lowering your expectations once. That's going to be the final end result. But you have a family. It's like this living thing that grows and changes and moves and your happiness, your joy,
00:16:48
Speaker
is going to be ruined unless it can also change and move and grow as your family does. Yeah. So just as an example, I'm thinking back to the time period when I had one, two, three kids, those first few kids. I could really regularly get pretty much everything done that I needed to. Now, if you had asked me back then, I would have said, no, life is crazy. You know, whatever. We all have our complaints every phase. But then I had twins, numbers four and five, and I had to let go of a lot.
00:17:16
Speaker
And then I had another baby and another baby and then we move. You know what I mean? Things just came along and it was a constant shift. Shift, shift, shift expectations, shift, shift, shift what's important to me. And then I got to a phase where I had teenagers that were able to help a little bit more. So some of my expectations were brought up and other ones still shifting, right? So that's just life is to constantly be aware that joyfully accepting the phase you're in is going to look maybe even like a way that a younger self would have hated.
00:17:44
Speaker
My younger self would probably be so excited that I have all these kids, that I have this home, that I have this business, and she would also be horrified at the state of my floors, like so grossed out. I actually visited a friend once who had a bunch of kids when I was young with one or two and remember thinking,
00:18:02
Speaker
How does one's floor get this disgusting and there was quite a bit of judgment for me in my head and I'm like I know So and and and the point of all this is that as we
00:18:19
Speaker
come up against obstacles that we can't necessarily change or that require a lot of mental gymnastics to get to a place where we can accept them, we grow, right? I am so much more patient and kind and understanding and long suffering now than I was 15 years ago because I have gone through all these experiences that show me that it just doesn't matter. The things that I'm fixating on do not matter as much as the kids or the other priorities, the higher priorities.
Adjusting Expectations in Parenting
00:18:49
Speaker
Yes, yes. Okay, some examples of places I've lowered my expectations. Back when I had one to three kids, they all took a nap together. And I had this at least hour, hour to two hours, where I could get everything, all the things done. And man, I could cram it into those one to two hours. Like I could have my house perfectly back. It was gorgeous. I could get supper in the oven. It was like, okay, woo.
00:19:14
Speaker
But then they grew up a little bit and they didn't take naps and they they like took my time during that nap time when I when I got things done. So yeah, it wasn't like I couldn't have a definite one to two hour slot where I could
00:19:31
Speaker
clean or catch up on things or do things for me. An example of something I've had to let go of, I know I've talked about it on previous episodes, is as my kids have grown, they have started cooking in the kitchen with me. And younger me would have been so excited to have
00:19:51
Speaker
other people helping out with the cooking and not having to do three meals a day like I did when I had one to three kids, right? I did all the meals every single day, all three meals. Now it's pretty rare that I cook three meals in a day. And I will have even gone days before where I haven't cooked a single meal because I've got kids interested or got kids assigned. But the thing that I've had to let go of is the state of my refrigerator and the organization of my cabinets.
00:20:19
Speaker
And I remember looking in my sister's refrigerator and she has two kids and I was like, oh my goodness, I hope she never comes to my house and looks in my refrigerator.
00:20:34
Speaker
But my kids do so much help and so much cooking. And I wouldn't let go of that. So I've had to lower my expectations, joyfully accept the condition of the inside of my refrigerator. And we clean it and we organize it. But when you've got five, six cooks in the kitchen, it just doesn't stay.
00:20:52
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. You know, this reminds me of an experience I had when I was a kid. I went to my aunt and uncle's house that had a bunch of kids. They were super inspiring. One of the reasons I wanted to have a bunch of kids because their house was just so much fun all the time. And I remember one time coming over and my cousin was just like, oh, do you want to make some cookies? I'm like in the middle of the afternoon. Don't we need to ask your mom? No, let's just do it. I remember thinking.
00:21:18
Speaker
This is so exciting. Cookies at 3 p.m. with no permission. Anyway, so my daughter had a bunch of friends over the other day and they made beignets or some fancy thing.
00:21:29
Speaker
And I remember thinking, how fun that we have a house where friends can come over and they can just make something for fun. Now that being said, there were a few incidents, wheels splattered everywhere. They chose to have a powdered sugar fight at the end. And someone was relegated to mopping the floor like four times to get it fully clean. And then I also lost my salt and pepper for like two days because one of the guests put it in a place that we don't normally put it. And everybody's going, where is the salt and pepper? I don't know.
00:21:58
Speaker
comes in the pantry. But anyway, the pros and cons, right? That life is half good and half bad, and every experience is going to show us some wonderful, amazing, fun things that we never anticipated, and also some really frustrating, annoying things. If we can just manage our minds, we can focus on the things that bring us the most joy. Okay, so I want to make you guys aware of something really quickly that occurred to me when I was planning for this episode. Having
00:22:23
Speaker
High, or I should say unrealistic expectations, is essentially a continual comparison game. Only instead of comparing yourself to someone else, you are comparing your current, beautiful, amazing life with an imaginary one. That is perfect, but your brain has completely made up. Isn't that interesting? Right? We all know comparison is the thief of joy, right?
00:22:46
Speaker
but we like to make up these stories in our head that like, oh, it should be like this. And so instead of enjoying these blessings and these miracles that we have in our life, we just keep comparing it to the non-existent perfect ideal. Yeah. What a tragedy to miss out on the amazing children, home, husband, life that exists in reality. What really is simply because it never measures up to the picture in your head.
00:23:14
Speaker
It's not real, the picture in your head is not real. I remember this reminds me of one time I said to my grandma, I said, grandma, was your house ever dirty?
00:23:25
Speaker
She was like, Audrey, of course, of course my house was dirty. Yeah. I was like, but it's always so perfect now. And she's like, yeah, but you go ahead and enjoy the life that's in your home right now, because you'll miss it someday. And I was like, Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. I could do that. I know. I think we talked about this in our episode about what I tell younger me about messy houses, but messes in my mind now equal living. And they didn't for a long time. They equaled.
00:23:55
Speaker
failure, that equaled imperfection, that equaled me falling off the bandwagon in some way, and now I'm better able to look at them and see life exists here. The toys are out because the kids were playing, and the papers are everywhere because they were being artistic, and the shoes are everywhere because they came in and out playing with friends, and what an amazing shift. So, so powerful.
00:24:19
Speaker
How do we get off this merry-go-round of comparison and disappointment and over and over? We start, like we mentioned earlier, by identifying those soundtracks that are playing in our head, those mental loops that we keep going through that are causing the suffering.
Overcoming Negative Thought Patterns
00:24:33
Speaker
Yeah. So once we've got, once we've identified one, one thing that we always say, and it usually has the word like never in the sentence, learn how to replace them. And we've talked about this a lot in previous episodes, but what you want to do is replace it with a thought that is believable and positive. So start with, I have children.
00:24:56
Speaker
Isn't that a neat thought? It's believable. Hello. And isn't that a neat thought? I have children. And so like, just the depth of gratitude that comes to me when I say that sentence, I have children. Wow. That's, that's amazing. So that's a believable thought. And it starts, it starts this little, it plants this little seed of gratitude that starts to grow into something really, really huge over time. So for me, that's been the key. Believable thoughts and positive thoughts.
00:25:24
Speaker
Yes, I love that. Just following up with the messes and the children. I follow a woman who has struggled with infertility for many years and she recently did a video. She just had another baby. She recently did a video of the state of her master bedroom. So there's like a bassinet and diapers and wipes everywhere and clothes on the floor and just kind of a tornado.
00:25:42
Speaker
And the whole video was, look at all my blessings. Look at this proof of life that this baby came to my family and erupted this mess in my room because it means I have life in my room now. And I just thought that was so beautiful. And could have equally been swapped out with a negative thought, something like, what a mess. This postpartum period is so hard. I hate this. This is frustrating, blah, blah, blah, right?
00:26:09
Speaker
So, we also need to decide, and we talked about this, some more logistical steps towards this in the Messy House episode, a couple other ones we can link to, but you need to decide what expectations you are not willing to let go of. So, we're not saying you just let your home devolve into a pig's die and a health hazard and you give up on everything. No, not at all. But you have to choose your battles and you have to decide what you're willing to let go of and what you're not willing to let go of.
00:26:36
Speaker
Yes, yes. For me, I let my kids manage their own bedrooms until we're going to have company and then I take over. But it's their little experiment with organization, with cleanliness, with all that, and with negotiating with a sibling who they share that bedroom with on a level of cleanliness and who makes the bed and who
00:27:00
Speaker
keeps the floor clean and who gets to put their clothes in which drawers and all that. That's their experiment. But the rest of the house gets to be to
00:27:09
Speaker
my direction on cleanliness and organization and all that. Um, so I would love if my kids rooms were Pinterest perfect, but they're not, they're not even close, but my kids are getting, it's like their little, what's their little Petri dish. Hopefully not literally. Oh my goodness. Probably probably. Under the bed. Yeah.
00:27:38
Speaker
Yes, for me, I have two main things that I maintain control of. One is my business, and that's why I kicked some kids out of this teeny tiny bedroom and made it my office because I needed a space that was my own to stay home with my kids and homeschool them and not lose my mind. And the other thing is the cleanliness and decor of my master bedroom.
00:27:58
Speaker
Generally, kids are not allowed in there very often. And when they are, they get in big trouble if they mess things up because the entire house is for my children, except that space is sacred. So I'm pretty biggy about that one. And it keeps me on top of things too. I put my clothes away pretty quickly, fold things pretty quickly, make my bed every day because it's so important for me to have one space that is pretty and everything else can be a mess. It's fine.
00:28:28
Speaker
All right, so then after you've got your little safe haven or you're joyfully accepted, everything else except the things that you're not willing to let go of, maybe it's your refrigerator for you. Then you make a plan for when you start slipping back into that negative thought loop, into frustration, into comparison with an unrealistic ideal.
00:28:51
Speaker
and you make a game plan for what you're gonna do, how you're gonna get yourself out of it. But we're suggesting to you that allowing yourself to meet your expectations in one area or one room in your house or one area of your life is one way to help you let other things go because you can like micromanage your little area and that lets you help other things go.
00:29:16
Speaker
Yeah, and in the end, you could let, we just keep talking about the states of our houses because that's obviously a big trigger, but in any area, you could obviously not try to manage the circumstances themselves at all, but it does require a lot of thought work, right? And so we've chosen instead to manage our minds around the rest of the house and make it easier on ourselves when we go to bed or when you look into your own space and realize, oh, this one is still the way I left it because that's important to me, right?
00:29:46
Speaker
And then as a final thought, I just wanted to also make sure that everyone is aware that there's nothing wrong with getting upset about things or being frustrated or angry sometimes that things aren't the way that you wish they were. But we just don't wanna live there, right? We just don't wanna stay there forever. Like sometimes I come home expecting my kids to be in bed and everything picked up and the dinner to be put away and it's not. And I find myself getting angry and I let myself get angry and I angry clean for a little bit. And then I realized, I don't wanna stay here. I don't like this.
00:30:15
Speaker
And then I have the tools to get myself out of it. So just a reminder that we're all still going to be human all the time. And the human experience is both positive and negative. But you now hopefully have some tools to pull you out of that when you just keep getting stuck in that same mental loop.
00:30:34
Speaker
Yes.
Inspirations from Marie Kondo
00:30:35
Speaker
So, I have a recommendation for you guys. You want to follow Tessa Romero. I don't know if I'm saying her name right will link her on Instagram. She is a great example of replacing
00:30:50
Speaker
Negative thoughts these negative thought loops these unrealistic expectations with positive ones go follow her start watching some of her little videos and That's really awesome and another thing that I think you should know is that recently Marie Kondo of the magic art of tidying up said after she had her third child and
00:31:12
Speaker
She pretty much gave up on cleaning an organization. So there you have it, from the expert herself. She lowered her expectations. I think about 50,000 people retweeted that article and just said, vindicated. Even Marie Kondo can only be herself until two kids, right?
00:31:30
Speaker
Right. She's learning joyful acceptance as well. She must've been listening to our podcast. I love it. Beautiful. It's so great.
Conclusion and Encouragement
00:31:37
Speaker
All right, friends, we hope this was helpful. Just remember awareness of what's going on inside your head and acceptance of all of the beautiful blessings that are in your life, even if they don't look the way you wish they would sometimes. So have a great week. So glad you tuned in. I'm Bonnie. I'm Adri, and we're outnumbered.
00:31:55
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. All right, friends, we hope this was helpful. Just keep fighting the good fight. Check into your mental status. Make sure there's no thought loops.
00:32:46
Speaker
delete that, start over.