Ep 56: How to Love the Good Life

 Welcome to the Mom On Purpose Podcast. I’m Lara Johnson and I’m here to teach you how to get out of your funk, be in a better mood, and play more with your kids. Manage your home better. Get your to-do list done and live your life on purpose with my proven method. This is possible for you, and I’ll show you how. You’re not alone anymore. We’re in this together. Hi, welcome to the Mom On Purpose Podcast. This is Lara Johnson, coming to you on a Friday. I don’t usually record on Friday and I am very excited today because I needed an extra day to just get some things done, and so I had my sitter come over and be with my baby for a couple hours and I will tell you it has been a very productive time. I just feel like anytime there’s big transitions going on, which we have a lot in our life. Right now, all of my systems and routines break, and everything falls apart and now we’re piecing it all back together. So today was one of those days. So, I hope that this podcast finds you really well and that you’re transitioning if you’re going back to school or you’re homeschooling your kids or whatever that transition is for you that you’re finding some peace right now. So, this episode I wanted to talk about today because I love talking about this with my clients. I have found that one of the most common questions that I get from people is how do I love the good life I have? And I find that so many of us have the things that we’ve always dreamed about, you know, when you were a little girl and you wanted the house and the picket fence and you wanted the kids, and you’ve done all of that and you expected yourself to be happier. And I find that this is such a common source of guilt for a lot of the people that a lot of the moms that I work with, because they’re genuinely confused on why they are not happier in the good life that they have. So that’s where we are starting today. So, you know this episode is for you as if you would die for your kids, but you don’t really like them a lot at the time. If you have all the things that you once dreamed of, or a good majority of the things that you dreamed of, but you wonder why you don’t feel happier with all of these things. You also know this episode is for you as if you feel really guilty, that you aren’t happier in your life. And you’ll also know it’s for you as if you’ve ever felt really scared to open up and talk about this concern with other people. Or if you have opened up to someone and they were shocked or they were offended. If it was a spouse and you told them that you weren’t as happy as you thought maybe you should be, or if it was even like a church leader and they invite you to pray more or fast or read the scriptures more, you feel like you’ve done that and you still don’t feel quote-unquote happier. So, I will say that for myself, I know that big transitions, kind of like we’re in right now, will always present some really difficult obstacles for me. These are times when I will struggle to feel happier with the good life that I have because of the way it changes my nervous system. And I’m actually going to do an episode on that because as I was writing this, I realized that’s another question that a lot of my clients have is you know what’s the difference between overstimulation and anger? Because I find that when we are in big transitions, oftentimes we are very overstimulated and let’s just say right, like with kids, you feel like you’re just in one big giant transition all the time. So, overstimulation happens a lot, but I want you just so. For me, that’s when I have a hard time stepping back and being able to really feel love, because my nervous system is a little off kilter. So, I know that about me. It happens other times, but I want you to stop, and I want you to consider it for yourself. When do you struggle to feel love? I want you just to think about that for a second. When do you struggle to feel love? And it might be all the time, and that’s okay too, but we want to know where your starting point is. So, you’ll know that this is. I guess this is you know one more. Going back to this episode is for you, is if you’ve ever stood in your kitchen and you’re looking around, maybe your kids are upset over something you’ve been ruffering them all day. You feel alone and you’re standing there thinking like how is this my life? And you’re kind of shocked by it. That’s where I want you to think. Okay, think about those times. So, in order for us to love the good life that we have, there’s a couple steps that we can take so that when those moments happen because if they haven’t yet, they will where you’re standing back and you’re wondering, like how is this my life, I want you first to practice being in love, and we talk a lot about growing our capacity to feel joy. That’s an episode I can’t remember what number it is, but I would scroll back and look. It’s one of my favorite episodes All of us that have a certain capacity to feel love, just like we feel a capacity to feel joy or anger without stepping outside of it and thinking something bad is coming or stepping outside of it and starting to feel a lot of shame. So, when we’re considering love, this is important to recognize we’re growing our capacity. Just like you grow and build strength of a muscle. It comes over time, but no one tells us that or teaches us that. So, when you are practicing being in love with your life, it is an intentional thing that you are doing. You are thinking and feeling about the things you genuinely love. Now there’s probably a lot of things that you don’t like the piles that are sitting on your nightstand, or the toilet that needs to be scrubbed, or the kid that is throwing toys at the sibling, like whatever that is. Yeah, it’s okay not to love those things. I want you to find the things that feel easy for you to love right now and, as you do, allow yourself just to be and to sit there, close your eyes and take a deep breath and allow it almost to expand within your heart. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is you can also try giving it up, all of it. Okay, I want you to think about this. I’m not saying walking away from your life, it’s the right answer, but I want you to imagine that you did that mentally. You give it all up. You give up your house, you give up your children, you give up your clothes that you hate washing, you give up the animals, all the responsibilities, the partner. Okay, I want you just to stay with that for a second. Imagine you walk away from all of it mentally. Now, when we get to this point and I think it’s really important for all of us to really imagine leaving it I remember sitting at one point and maybe I’ve shared this on the podcast before where I was talking with a family member and my dad and they were talking about how they couldn’t ever imagine a mom leaving their children. I used to have the same thought until I had postpartum depression and then I realized, oh no, I can actually see that very clearly. I was not in a good space mentally. I was completely maxed out on every angle of my life, and I was very unhealthy, and it scared me very badly. And so, when I thought about, you know, going back to that time, one of the things that actually stabilized me was giving it all up mentally because I gave myself permission to walk away and be done forever. And that’s when I felt the most love I’ve ever felt that I chose to be here. I choose to stay married. I choose to show up every day for my kids because I truly do love them. And so, for me, that was such a life changing experience is when I finally gave myself permission to walk away from all of it, and what I realized was that I actually had no desire to do that, that I truly do love my life. So, the next thing is to ask yourself what’s the purpose of whatever the thing that you’re doing in your life is. What is the purpose of wiping your countertop? For me, I hate sitting down on a countertop to eat and putting my elbows down and there’s like crumbs all over it. You know what I mean. I just don’t like it. I hate it. I hate walking around on my floor and stepping on crunchy things. Oh, it just drives me bonkers. I actually really like my kids and I do want them to eat, so I do want to feed them. Like that’s the purpose, is like that underlying love. But I had to ask myself, like why am I doing what I’m doing and if I didn’t have a good enough reason, I just stopped doing it. I clean my house because I like a clean house. That’s the purpose of it. It helps my brain feel less cluttered and I can find things easier, so I’m not as frustrated. That’s why I do what I do. So, I want you to ask yourself that, like what’s the purpose behind whatever it is that you’re doing? The next is I want you to allow your space or allow space for your dreams in your life. This is one of the biggest ones that I see with my clients is that if they are struggling to love the good life they have, it’s because they don’t feel like there’s any space for them in that life, because they are so spread thin on everything else that it becomes very overwhelming to them and they feel like they’re having to like elbow their way in to help their family members know that they’re a person that matters too. So, if this resonates with you, the biggest thing to remember here is that space doesn’t just sit around waiting to be filled. So, if you’re going to have space for your dreams, it’s not like you can just wait for that magic time where it just is ready for you to pick up. Maybe that happens to other people. I’ve yet to see that happen for any of my clients, unless maybe their kids have moved out of the house. That’s a little bit different, but I don’t want you having to wait, you know, 20, 30 years before you feel like you have space for your dreams and to feel like you matter within your family dynamic, and so I think about life being like water, where it’s just going to ooze in and fill in all of the crevices. The only way for you to find space for your dreams is to create it for yourself, and we’ll do another episode on that, on the tool that I have, the time creators, so that you can see how you can use that to create space. But for me, what it really boiled down to was my dreams were just as important as every other family member in my household, and so if that meant that my children didn’t do as many activities as other kids, so be it, because that was important to me. That doesn’t have to be the case for you, but I want you just to give yourself space to consider some of these things. The last thing that I will say is to remind your brain that your circumstances don’t create your feelings. It does not matter how many good circumstances you have in your life. If you do not have thoughts that create the feeling of love, it doesn’t matter what circumstances you have, you will still be unhappy, and your brain will fight and argue with that. Just remind your brain your circumstances don’t create your feelings, your thoughts do. So, you can step back and really sit like what are the thoughts? I want to think about my life and be really intentional with that. I Remember being at this point for myself when I really had to teach my brain this that no matter how many Circumstances I changed, I was never going to feel love. Until I decided to feel love. And that was really empowering because what it allowed me to do was take back control of the way that I felt, and it control feels like a really harsh word. It gave me permission to stop waiting for things to get better and magically improve, even though life for the most part was already good. I wasn’t going to wait for my husband’s schedule, you know, to free up or my kids to stop having challenges in school. I was going to practice being here and practice feeling love and practice those thoughts that generate that feeling and because of it, I really do love the good life that I have, and I invite you to do the same. Have a wonderful day. Thank you for listening. Please share, review, and subscribe to this podcast so that together we can live life on purpose.