S04|08 - Finding You Again: 5 Steps to Intentionally Creating a Healthy Relationship with YOU

Years ago, I felt stuck in the weeds of parenting: nursing, non-sleeping kiddos, diagnoses, cooking, cleaning… repeating. I felt like I’d lost myself; who was I? What did I enjoy doing? What was important to me? Growing my relationship with myself was slow and intentional and changed everything in my life. It can change yours too.

In this episode you’ll hear:

• How to amplify positive emotions and lean into them more
• How toxic positivity differs from working on feeling happy
• Steps to help us build a healthy relationship with ourselves
• People-pleasing and not meeting our own needs

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Episode Transcript

Crystal The Parenting Coach: Hey, I'm Crystal, a certified life coach and mom of four. In this podcast, we combine radical connection and positive parenting theories with the How-To Life Coaching Tools and Mindset Work to completely transform our relationship with our children. 

Join me on my journey, unleash your inner parenting expert, and become the mother you've always wanted to be. Make sure you subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast and rate this podcast on Apple, and check out my transformative monthly membership for moms in the show notes. 

Hey, and welcome today's episode, Finding You Again: 5 Steps to Intentionally Creating a Healthy Relationship with YOU. 

Are you feeling like you’ve lost You? You’re not alone

So, if you listen to my last week's podcast episode, we talked all about consciously thinking and how we can create a better relationship with ourselves through conscious thinking; and we're going to dig more into that today. 

I hope that you're feeling better. I hope you've implemented some of those things and that you're working on You. I had a client who one time said, "Okay, so I'm doing this conscious thinking thing, I'm working through stuff, I'm feeling better, I'm feeling healed, but I'm kind of also feeling a little bit blah – just like, okay, like bored with life – so, now what?" 

I posted a Reels on IG a while ago, and she mentioned that – and a few of client, a few other clients that week… I feel like three clients that week mentioned that and were like, 'That exactly describes what I'm feeling. 

So, I'm going to read the audio from that Reels, and you can tell me if this is something that you feel like you connect with as well. This is the phrase. The audio is from Numb Little Bug; Do you ever get a little bit tired of life? Like you're not really happy, but you don't want to die? Like you're hanging by a thread, but you got to survive because you've got to survive. Like your body's in the room but you're not really there. Like you have empathy inside, but you don't really care. Like you're fresh out of love, but it's been in the air. Am I past repair? 

So, I wanted to read that to you because so many clients said, "Yes, I felt like you were speaking to me – like that is what I feel like." 

So, maybe you've been doing some work, maybe you've been doing a little bit healing and you feel like things are getting a little bit better, but you still feel a little bit stuck or a little bit bored or a little bit lackluster when it comes to those, you know, positive energy and emotions you want to be feeling. 

So, I want you to number one, go listen to last week's episode and do that work – and do that work for as long as you feel like you need to; and then move on to this week's episode.

Steps to help us build a healthy relationship with ourselves

I'm going to give you these five steps that are going to work to help you find that passion again, find that love for you again – find that, just that thrive for life again.

1. Get to know you

Number one is to get to know you. A lot of times we don't really know ourselves; we get stuck in parenthood – we get stuck in motherhood. We're doing all the things right; we're cooking and we're cleaning and we're driving kids places. 

We don't even have time to think about what our thoughts are about us, what we think about us, what we like to do – or definitely not time to do what we want to do. 

And I don't think this is just moms; I remember talking to a dad recently who said he couldn't remember the last time that he did something for him. That all of the things that he did were for work or for his family or, you know, it was all responsibility. It wasn't for things that would fuel him just for fun. 

So, I want you to, first; get to know you. What do you like? What do you dislike? What are things that you like to do? What are your opinions on current or past political events or things happening in the world? Do you like to be around you? Why or why not? What are things that bring you joy now, that you might do just for fun? 

Now, if this is a hard question to answer because when I heard this answer, I would've heard this question years ago. Somebody asked me and I thought, 'I don't know; I don't know what brings me joy, I don't know what I like to do.' 

I had been in the trenches of motherhood for so many years, almost a decade, at this point, that I just couldn't even remember what was fun. All I could think of were like Netflix and junk food. 

And I knew that that wasn't what truly brought me joy, but I didn't know what could bring me joy. So, one of the things this lady at the conference that I was at said was to think back to when you're younger – maybe a teenager, maybe even a child – what do you remember bringing you joy then? 

So, I immediately thought of biking. I loved to bike through my small little hometown. I was basically able to just bike whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted because it was so small. 

And I just remember the wind on my face and the sun, and just loving being outdoors and love being biking. So, I love loving being on a bike. So, I decided that I would get a bike because I didn't actually even own one at this time so I bought myself a bike. 

Another thing that I thought of was; I enjoyed swimming, so I decided that I would try doing that again. I remembered later in life that I had been interested in sign language, that I was interested in watercolor painting. And so, I kind of just started trying a bunch of different things. 

I didn't know which one was going to bring me joy or if it would bring me joy, but I was like, 'I'll just try.' I took a weaving course, I did watercolor painting online, I signed up for an ASL class; I did all of these things to just find out, what do I even enjoy doing? What brings me joy? What fuels me? What makes me feel more energized when I'm finished it? 

And I did enjoy biking, and I did enjoy spending time outside. I tried some yoga, I tried some meditation, I tried a lot of new things; but it came all from this question of, what brings me joy? 

We can get to know ourselves on a deeper level and be a lot more fun to be around for ourselves, right, if we like being around ourselves, even when it's just us when we spend more time doing things that will bring us that joy. 

A lot of this has to do with what I talked about last episode also – our thoughts about us – because it's not going to be a great space to be by ourselves with us if our brain is attacking us all of the time, so we want to work through that also. 

But once we have worked through that and we are continuously working on that, because we're probably always going to have to, take some time to get to know you. What are your opinions on things? What do you like and what do you dislike? What do you do that brings you joy? And do more of that. Do more of getting to know you.

2. Take care of you

Number two, take care of you. Now I want to talk for a minute about self-care, because I know that it's kind of a hot topic, everybody's talking about it, but; what does self-care actually mean? 

True Self-Care versus Surface Desires

When I think of self-care, I think of true self-care versus surface desires. Surface desires feel good momentarily, but they typically have a net negative for either us or other people. 

So, if I stay up really late watching TV and eating junk food that might feel good in the moment – over time, that's going to actually be a net negative for me… I'm not going to feel better, I'm not going to have taken care of myself. It's going to bring some sort of difficulty for me later on. So, that's not really taking care of me. 

So, if we can dig below those just natural kind of inclinations to surface desires – what truly feels like it would be taking care of me, taking care of my body, taking care of my mind? Now, it might be pretty easy for you to come up with things. I'll mention a few, but there's no right or wrong answer to this; it’s really whatever you feel would feel like taking care of you. 

For me, it's eating healthy foods. I enjoy cooking, so it would be cooking healthy foods. Another one is meditation; that's something I've just been getting into over the last year, and I've really enjoyed it. 

Another one is yoga or exercise, counseling or coaching – thought journaling, which I talk about on this podcast. And you can find me on Instagram, I'll be talking about that also; I love to talk about thought journaling. Going on walks, spending time outdoors – spending less time on screens, I find that that really helps me to feel better. 

So, just take a few minutes and brainstorm; what feels like it would feel like taking care of me in that true self-care way – physically, my body, my mind, my soul… not just the surface desires?

3. Work on feeling more happy feelings

Number three, work on feeling more happy feelings.

How to amplify positive emotions and lean into them more

So, for instance, I try to notice and focus when I'm feeling joy or when I'm feeling love. And maybe I'm only feeling a little bit of it at that time. Maybe I'm out on a walk and I'm like, 'Oh, this is kind of nice.' 

So, I'm going to really try to focus on that nice feeling, 'Okay, what am I feeling right now? Am I feeling gratitude? Am I feeling love? Am I feeling content?' And I try to amplify that a little bit. 

One of the great ways to do this is to layer on a feeling. If I'm feeling joy or if I'm feeling love, I can layer on a feeling of gratitude. I read this in a book, through Jody Moore, which I love; I loved her book. She talked about, we talk often about layering negative feelings – but she talked about also layering those positive emotions, those positive feelings. 

So, notice those feelings and then try to layer on some more positive feelings, like gratitude or like joy. Gratitude is such an interesting one. I found a lot of quotes on gratitude, and I'm going to share a couple of them with you. G. K. Chesterton said, "I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder". 

So, that made me think of that idea of layering it so we can feel that happiness and then maybe you can move it beyond that to wonder, and then maybe we can feel some gratitude. And it is such a high form of thought. Oprah Winfrey said, "Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more – if you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough".  

I know this to be true. I've seen this in my life. I've seen this in my clients' lives. The more that we focus on our own imperfections – the more that we notice what we're doing wrong, what we should be doing more of, what we don't have… we don't have enough time, we don't have enough money, we don't like the way we look, we don't like our weight, we don't like our friends, we don't like our life situation – it's going to bring us more of that.

Our brain is going to continuously pull in evidence of whatever our story is. And if our story is not enough – me, my life, all the things in my life are not enough – your brain will only feed you evidence of what is not enough. 

So, the reason why gratitude works is because when we can sit in thankfulness for what we do have, our brain will start to focus on, 'Oh, what else are we thankful for here? What else do we have?' We’ll feel more joy. We’ll feel more abundance. So, this is another great way to work on building your relationship with yourself to really focus on those more positive happy feelings.

How toxic positivity differs from working on feeling happy

But I do want to mention something briefly; this is not toxic positivity. Toxic positivity is you should feel happy all the time, even about things that are sad or hard or difficult – feel happy, feel joy; that is not what we're talking about here. 

We're talking about the 50/50. Half of life, we're probably going to feel more of those heavy emotions. Half of life, we're going to feel more of the light, happy, positive emotions. Embracing both is part of a healthy emotional life. Brené Brown says, "If we numb the dark, we also numb the light." 

We have to have both. We have to have the dark in order to feel the light. So, I don't mean just flipping a switch and trying to think positively all the time, but I mean, when you are feeling those positive emotions, let's move them a little bit more. Let's amplify them a little bit more. 

Let's move to gratitude a little bit more. Let's layer it with wonder, with joy – and not have to think positive, happy thoughts all of the time, because that will make us feel shame whenever we feel the more negative or more heavy thinking. 

So, you can-- I've talked a lot about emotions in the past on this podcast. You can go see those in my previous seasons about what to do with those heavy emotions, how to process them. 

4. Learning

Okay, number four is learning. Use your brain. Again, this might seem silly or this might seem obvious, but when we're out of the game for a while – when we're like just deep in the mire of motherhood – it's really easy for us not to learn, not to read, not to focus on our own growth. 

This goes back along with number one when I talked about finding things that bring you joy. One of the things that brought me joy was starting to learn again, starting to take time from me again through learning and expanding my brain. 

So, I want you to think of what interests you. Maybe it's like a true-crime podcast or a Parenting podcast or some Positive Psychology book you want to read. Maybe you could get some books on investigative practices. You could listen to podcasts and then you could read more about it. 

Maybe you're interested in traveling. So, maybe you could start to learn a new language or learn about the culture or the people or the history of the places that you hope to visit – or that you're planning on visiting in the future. 

I'm going to tell you a little story about me; When I was-- A few years before I started my life coaching journey, I was homeschooling my kids and I was reading about this philosophy on education – and it said that if we wanted our children to love learning, that we needed to also be inspiring them to learn. 

I loved that idea and that concept, obviously, because connection-based parenting is all about inspiring our kids to learn. So, I loved it right away; and I thought, 'Well, I'm not really doing anything to inspire them to learn, I don't really do anything for learning or for myself.' 

So, I tried to think back on things that I used to love learning about. And I went back to my Psychology degree, and I'm like, 'Oh, I love to learn about human behavior, so let's do that again.' 

So, I started to get some Positive Psychology books out, some parenting books out, some Child Development books out; that’s what my passion was before, and I started to read them. 

I started to-- That's when I started reading Brené Brown, and I loved everything that I read from her. And then I started to just write up these like short little reports online on a Word Document, mostly just for my own self so that I could remember what it was that I had been reading about because my memory's not the greatest anymore. 

And so, I would have these little reports, and then I started to discuss them with friends. I started to discuss them with my family. I actually started book clubs where we would read books together, and we could have these conversations about it. And all of this brought me to the point where I was actually interested enough to go back to school again and take my Master's program. 

And long story short; I found life coaching at the same time I was looking for a Master's program, and I loved it. I fell in love with everything about it. I found The Life Coach School, and I ended up signing for that instead of my Master's program. And here I am a few years later. So, it all started through taking time to spend on me, spend getting to know me, and definitely time learning.

5. Stop being a people-pleaser

Number five is say 'No' more often; you'll be so much happier if you say 'No' more often, and what I mean by this is people-pleasing. If you have not listened to my podcast episode called People-Pleasing Mamas, go back and listen to that. 

We have a whole generation of people that are people-pleasers because of how we were raised, because of the feedback that we got when we were younger. We felt like we were in charge of other people's emotions; that it was up to us if they were feeling bad, and that it was up to us to make them feel better. 

So, then we, now, are living this life where we feel like we are in charge of other people's emotions still; that it's our fault if they're thinking negative thoughts or they're feeling negative things, and that we need to help them move on from that. 

And because of that, we feel like we need to over-people-please – like, we're like, 'Okay, how can I make this better?' We do something wrong or that our brain tells us it’s wrong even if it's not wrong. And we try to kind of move beyond just what a normal response or reaction would be to just say 'Yes' all of the time. 

Even when everything inside of us is saying 'No'. People-pleasing is inside, it's a No – and I know that it's a No – but outside I'm saying Yes, anyways. I'm saying Yes at the expense of me. If it's a No, it's already a No. But we often say Yes because we want them to be happy, we want them to feel better. 

And the truth behind this is we want them to feel happy and kind – and, whatever, peaceful, so that they can, kind of, bring that energy down… and that we can bring our energy down when they bring their energy down. 

So, if we can work on our relationship with ourselves and our thoughts and feelings about us, it'll actually be a lot easier for us to say No more because we'll realize that we're not responsible for other people's thoughts and feelings; we are responsible for the energy that we bring into different situations and the influence that we have and the impact that we have – but we're not responsible for how other people interpret things for their perspective, for how they're thinking and feeling. 

If we go into a room and we do all the right things; we're kind and we're loving and we're carrying all of that, they can still be thinking, 'I just really don't like that person', or, 'Oh, I don't like how she said that', or 'That was rude'. Or like, they have their own perspective and opinion, just like we have our own perspective and opinion; and they can have that, it's not our business what they're thinking – we don't need to make that our business.

So, saying 'No' more when we feel like it is a No – tapping into what we really want to be saying, verbalizing whatever needs we have here, whatever Nos we have inside of us, is a great way to care for yourself.

So, I hope that was helpful. Go back to the last episode and to this episode, and just keep working on these two episodes. Keep building that relationship that you have with yourself, and notice how other things around you change. 

Our relationship with ourselves is the lens through which we see everything else; our relationship with our family, with our friends, with the goals that we're setting – it's all interconnected. And so, notice how the glasses that you have – when they start to change, when they start to clear a little bit, everything else will as well.

Crystal The Parenting Coach: I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Make sure that you give it Five Stars on Apple, and check out my monthly membership for moms in the show notes.