276. Lighten Up for the Holidays

I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy episode 276: Lighten Up for the Holidays.

Welcome to Better Than Happy. I’m your host, Jody Moore. I’m a mother to four children. I’m a huge Taylor Swift fan, and I’m a Master Certified Life Coach. I’m here to teach you how to manage your brain and manage your emotions so that you can create a life that’s even better than happy. Are you ready? Let’s go.

How’s it going? Welcome to episode 276 and welcome to the end of October, we almost made it to November, two months left before we get through this heck of a year that we’re having. I don’t know that things are going to be resolved by 2021. But at least we’re making progress.

I wanted to talk to you a little bit today about lightening up for the holidays because the holidays are a coming. And I think most of us have a combination love hate relationship with the holidays, if you’re like me anyway. Especially those of you who are moms raising kids, maybe you’re a member of the church and you recognize that Christmas especially is one of our most favorite and most pivotal holidays, Christmas and Easter.

I want to offer to you that this year the holidays could be different. I still want you to love the holidays. I still want you to keep all the parts you love. But I want us to lighten up a little bit. I think if this year has taught us anything it’s been a good reminder about things that are important and things that are not important. I know for me anyway it’s helped me not take for granted some of the things that I probably took for granted before.

And so what I want to talk to you about today is a component of that. For those of you who are in Be Bold, I’m creating a whole series of courses and extra coaching calls that I’m going to be making available to you for the entire months of November and December around this program, Lighten Up for the Holidays. It’s sort of a bonus program that I’m going to be offering in there. So stay tuned. But these are the three areas that I’m focusing on in this program.

The first one is relationships. What if we decided to lighten up your relationships a little bit for the holidays? Holidays tend to be a time when we see family maybe more than we do the rest of the year. We have some get togethers that are different than just kind of our normal day-to-day routine. And so this tends to bring up the drama that might be existing. This brings up the work that we have to do on our relationships that we haven’t done yet. And so I want to offer to you that maybe this year is the year that you want to try to lighten up your relationships a little bit.

And I want to give you some things to think about today to help you to do that. And then like I said, there’ll be a lot more coming in Be Bold. But here’s what I would offer to you as a starting point. So first thing is I’m going to address some of the areas where I see we create the most problems for ourselves in our relationships.

The first area is judgment. When we judge one another we create problems. When we judge ourselves we create problems. Judgment in most cases is not useful, not always, sometimes it is useful, some judgment is useful. But a lot of the judgment that we have in our relationships of our family and close friends is putting distance in our relationships.

But here’s what I want to tell you today. A lot of times when I’m coaching you guys, you come to me and you say, “I know I shouldn’t judge. I know I’m judging this person and I shouldn’t.” And what I always tell you is, “Let’s just start first of all with your thought that you shouldn’t be judging, because that’s not going to work. It’s not going to serve you to think that thought.” So I want you to know that there is a reason why we judge one another. And it’s based in healthy human behavior.

So sometimes I like to remind my clients, “Listen, if you had no judgment and no opinions of other people in your lives that would be weird.” That might even fall into sociopathic, psychopathic behavior, to have no opinions and no judgments. Or it might mean that you are now a robot without any opinions.

So the judgment at its core is coming from a place that at least your brain thinks is useful. Your brain is trying to look out for you. It’s trying to look out for danger. It’s trying to find validation that you’re okay and that you’re enough. And part of how it does that is to have opinions about what people should and shouldn’t do. It wants to believe that it can know what to expect, it wants to believe that it knows how the world is and should be. So that’s sort of, if we just take it down to its bare roots, that’s where judgment is coming from.

It’s not wrong that you have opinions. It’s not necessarily ‘wrong’ that you’re judging these people in your lives. If you drop the part where you say, “I shouldn’t,” then you can move into okay, so I do. Interesting. Isn’t that curious that I judge?

And part of the work we do in coaching, you guys know this who are in Be Bold because we listen to each other and you’ve heard me coach people over and over again. And when we take a look at the judgment from this objective place, we always see that it doesn’t make sense. We always see that it’s not useful. It’s not doing what the brain thinks it’s going to do, which is to try to control people. And in fact it’s only punishing us. So we always see that. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have it. Of course you’re going to have it.

Until we slow everything down and take a look at it, we start teaching your brain something new. So we don’t want your brain to lose the part where it tries to protect you, or it takes guesses or makes assessments. So we’re not going to say that part is bad. We’re just going to add to it. We’re going to add other things like the ability to be okay with other people being who they are, the ability to understand that we get to have our opinions and other people get to have theirs, the ability to own that we create our own emotions and other people don’t.

And it takes some practice to see that and some practice in responding to your brain when it talks to you, and it takes finding what is the most useful way to respond to it. But we don’t get to do any of that if we say, “I shouldn’t be judging.” All we do is we just sort of push it down. Now we’re judging ourselves for judging them. And then we lose the ability to do all those things.

Another thing that we do that I have talked about here on the podcast, we certainly talk about it a lot in Be Bold in our coaching is we mirror one another. Maybe my husband is grumpy. If I get really grumpy that he’s grumpy now I’m mirroring him. Or maybe my toddler is having a tantrum. And if I have a little tantrum, even though it might look different, maybe it’s just in my head or maybe it’s me throwing things in the sink instead of kicking and screaming on the floor. But if I have a tantrum about my toddler’s tantrum, now I’m mirroring them. And that is our default.

So, again, sometimes clients come to me and say, “I know I’m mirroring, I shouldn’t be mirroring.” And I always say, “No, of course you’re mirroring, that’s just what human beings do at times.” The best human beings on the planet sometimes mirror one another in ways that aren’t serving them. So you can’t judge yourself for that, you have to recognize that that’s just natural. And in many ways, and in many times it serves us really well. We don’t want to take that part away from you. That would be weird. That would make you unhealthy in some way, mentally unhealthy, emotionally unhealthy.

So again it’s not that you shouldn’t be mirroring. I’m mirroring, that’s fascinating. Let’s dive deeper into it. Let’s take a look at it. Let’s even find the humor and the amusement in it. It is always kind of amusing when we start looking at it. And when we can just sort of be amused with ourselves, curious about ourselves, totally compassionate and open with ourselves, we gain a lot more leverage.

The next thing I want to address that I see a lot is that we try to control other people. Maybe we become somewhat manipulative. Maybe we’re passive aggressive. Maybe we try to convince them to think a certain way, or feel a certain way, or so something. We are really, really good at trying to control the people around us. And again even though in many cases that doesn’t serve us, and it doesn’t work, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be doing it.

Please don’t go to the thought, I know, I shouldn’t be trying to control him, because that also causes you to lose access to yourself to what’s really going on for you. Here’s the truth. You have a really good reason for it. It’s coming from what you’re thinking and what you’re feeling and what you’re brain is believing about what’s causing your emotions.

Your brain is basically, when we’re trying to control other people it’s because our brains think that those people are the reason for our emotions. But those people are never the reason for our emotions, our own thoughts are. But you have a really good reason for believing that.

There is something behind it that is coming from truth, let’s just say. So we have to get to that and understand that. And we have to understand the parts that don’t make sense. We have to really show your brain that in a compassionate loving slow way. And we can’t do that if you shut it all down with I shouldn’t be controlling.

The last one I want to talk about with relationships here is our desire to have everybody like us, and our fear that maybe they’re judging us, or talking about us, or that they disapprove of us. Again I hear this over and over again. “I know I shouldn’t care what people think,” to which I say, “Of course you care what people think. You are a healthy human being on planet Earth.” As long as you’re a healthy human being on planet Earth you’re going to care what people think to a certain extent.

Now, that doesn’t mean it has to control you, it doesn’t mean it has to be all-consuming, it doesn’t mean it has to prevent you from being who you want to be or showing up in the world. But a part of you is always going to care what people think. That is healthy human behavior. When you get to that place then we get to take a look at why we care about what people think. And it’s different for all of us.

We all have different things motivating us at different times. Different fears, different stories our brains are feeding us about why we should try to get everyone to like us, why that would be the best thing. But we want to really take a look at what it is for you individually, not just what it was for your friend that she offers you. Maybe it’s the same, but maybe not. And we lose the access to it when you tell yourself, I know, I shouldn’t care what people think. Of course you care what people think. Alright, are you with me?

So that is where I want everyone to begin in lightening up your relationships. You have to begin by lightening up your own judgments of yourself. So if you aren’t even able to recognize yet that you’re the one judging, or mirroring, or trying to control, or whatever, then that’s okay. We will need to get to that point. I hope this podcast is helping you to get to that point.

But then the next step isn’t yeah, I shouldn’t do that. It’s interesting, let’s take a closer look. Let’s figure out what’s going on here. Let’s really explore me now instead of just exploring the other person, which is what we do. We spend lots of time thinking about them and how they’re doing it wrong, and how they’re a mess. We’re going to explore us, but not with judgment, just with curiosity. Because you will find it’s so easy to get leverage over yourself when you can just explore yourself openly.

So, again, I will be teaching you a lot more strategies, so stay tuned those of you in Be Bold. If you’re not in Be Bold, come and join us there. I’m going to give you a lot more strategies but that’s where I want everyone to begin and then I want you to bring me your specific situations to the coaching calls.

I’ll be doing extra calls for the months of November and December, if you’re wanting to work on this topic of relationships. If you don’t want to, that’s okay too. We’re still going to do all the other things we do every month in Be Bold. There will be plenty for you. And there are in fact two more components of this program, this bonus program, Lighten Up for the Holidays. So relationship’s the first one.

The second one is I want you to lighten up your overwhelm. Again, a lot of you listening and the majority of you in Be Bold are women. Women who are moms, although I would say we have equal parts, moms with young kids and moms who have empty nesters. We have moms at all stages of life. We do have also some of you that aren’t moms, some dads, some men. Anybody’s welcome. But the majority of the people in the program I would say are women who are moms. And for some reason when the holidays come along we like to overwhelm ourselves. Why do we do this?

Well, that’s what I want to talk to you about here next. Overwhelm is not just something that happens to you. I’m saying it on purpose this way; we like to overwhelm ourselves because we do it to ourselves. Sometimes I like to say we indulge in overwhelm, because when I hear the word ‘indulgent’ I think of a box of chocolates. I think about sitting down with a box of chocolates and just eating some of them, just indulging in that chocolate. It’s indulgent because it’s easy, it’s not fuel that’s sustaining my body, but it’s enjoyable, it’s pleasurable, it’s simple, it’s just something I do.

Now, nothing wrong with indulging in some chocolate every now and then, and overwhelm, I know you’re saying, “I don’t get your metaphor here, Jody, because overwhelm doesn’t feel like eating chocolate to me.” But here’s what I mean. We indulge in it because it’s just easier to just feel overwhelmed, maybe we complain about it. Maybe we at least add some self-pity on top of it. That’s a lot easier than going in and figuring out why we’re overwhelmed and doing something about it if we don’t want to, or just owning that we’re creating it and being okay with feeling it.

Those things are a lot harder to do, but I’m going to teach you how to do them this month. So that is the first thing you need to understand, is that overwhelm is not created by how many things you have on your to do list. I promise you this is not true my friends. In fact I bet that most of you are capable of 10 times more than you’re doing right now. And I’m not telling you, you should do 10 times more, or that you need to do 10 times more.

I just want you to know that if you cleaned up the way you’re thinking about yourself, and the things on your to do list, and your life in general, you would have the capacity and the energy to do 10 times more. Alright, maybe not 10 times more, but maybe double what you’re doing now. So overwhelm does not come from how many things you have to do, it does not come from how many people are demanding your time. It comes from your thoughts, because overwhelm is a feeling. And thoughts create feelings every time.

Now, I want you to think about how you show up when you’re overwhelmed. How do you behave? Who do you become in the world when overwhelm is the emotion driving you? Do you start taking frantic action? Because sometimes people tell me, “No, this overwhelm is actually helping me get a lot more done.” And I say, “Okay, but what if we could get a lot more done and enjoy it?” It’s possible to.

So anyway, what I find for myself and many of my clients is that overwhelm typically looks like snapping at the people around us, we become short and inpatient, why isn’t everyone moving as fast as me? Why isn’t everyone worried and focused like me? Why do they seem to be just hanging out over there having a good time and I’m over here miserable? They should join me. So sometimes we get snappy, cranky, it becomes harder not to yell at people because we’re already overwhelmed and then people come along and be people which requires thought work.

Maybe we’re exhausted, maybe we’re tired from overwhelm. All in all it is not in the spirit of the holidays. I don’t think it’s what our founding fathers had in mind when they created Thanksgiving. And I don’t think it’s what the Lord would have for us when it comes to celebrating his birth. I don’t think that’s what he would pick. So, on the one hand I know there’s a lot of talk about simplifying the holidays. And I’m all for that. I’m all for simplifying the gift giving and the decorations, and the parties, and maybe some of that will happen naturally due to Covid this year.

But what I also want to teach you guys is how to be able to still do all the things that you want to do and not feel overwhelmed. Because that is an option, I promise you. So I’m going to be teaching you, some of it will be very practical time management type strategies. But I think without all the thought work behind it, without taking a look at why we don’t stick to our calendar sometimes, why we feel overwhelmed in the end. Then I think that time management is not really necessary. You can just Google that and find it anywhere you want.

So there will be a component of that, I’m going to teach you my strategy for time management. But a lot of our focus will be on the mental side and how to not feel overwhelmed and still get a lot more done.

The third area, and again all of these are optional, but maybe you want to participate in all three, maybe just one. But the third area I’m going to be doing a lot of teaching and coaching around is around food. Because if you want to you could literally lighten up for the holidays, you could lighten up your body, did you know this? And you don’t have to. So these are kind of the things that I have in mind as I’m creating the program around food, which is if you want to, let’s lose five pounds this holiday. That’s what I’m going to do.

I’ve been, as many of you know, working on losing weight for – I don’t know – four or so months now. I’ve lost about 15 pounds. I’m feeling really good. But I want to lose five more pounds over the holidays. So if you want to join me on that you can, but you don’t have to, some of you are like, “No, thank you. I do not want to try to lose weight over the holidays.” And you don’t have to. There might still be work in this program around food that’s useful for you. Maybe you just want to not gain five pounds this holiday. That’s an option too.

Or maybe weight has nothing to do with it and you don’t even care about that. But you just don’t want to feel so controlled by food. You don’t want to feel so out of control around food and holidays tend to bring a lot of food, a lot of really yummy kinds of foods that are fun but don’t necessarily fuel or serve our bodies.

Now, if you’re a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints like me, then you’ve probably observed that food is a big part of our culture. We use food to celebrate. We use food to buffer away from our emotions because we don’t drink alcohol or do a lot of the other things that other people do to buffer. And so food ends up being our go to a lot of times.

Food is even how we get people to participate. If we’re planning an activity for the youth especially, but even for adults, and we want people to come we’d pretty much need to say, “By the way there will be refreshments.” And your turnout will increase if you do that. So we like food and I’m okay with that. I’m not telling you that you shouldn’t like food or that you shouldn’t be able to celebrate and things like that. But for some of us that’s turned into this out of control relationship, unhealthy relationship with food.

Now, as a side note when I lived in Huntington Beach my husband and I drove by another church that was of another denomination on the way to our church one Sunday. And they had a big sign outside saying ‘Donuts today’. And I was like, “What? We should have donuts at our church.” So anyway there is that. But I want to give you just a few things again to help you get started on this. If you’re not in Be Bold and you’re not going to get all the other things I teach you then I at least want to give you something to give you a jump start.

So the first thing I hear a lot is this thought, “I just love food.” Now, I want you to just pause and consider that. I did an Instagram post about this not too long ago. Because here’s the truth, food doesn’t love you. Food doesn’t care about you, it really doesn’t.

And so I just want you to ask yourself if that’s really a healthy relationship you have with food. Because if I have a teenage daughter and she’s obsessed with this boy who doesn’t care a lick about her, and she says to me, “I just love him though.” I’m probably going to respond with, “Okay, but honey, he doesn’t love you. And you should find someone who does love you.” So that’s all I’m saying is, make sure your relationship with food isn’t unhealthy. And I’m going to help you rethink all of this if it is.

I’m fine with you enjoying food. But if it’s out of control, if you feel controlled by that food then you have an unhealthy relationship with food and we need to take a look at that and redefine your relationship.

Another thing I hear a lot is this thought, “I just don’t want to miss out. The whole family’s going out for ice-cream. And if I don’t eat it I’m going to be missing out. I’m going to go to the,” – I don’t know if there’s going to be a ward party this year. But whatever it is, “I’m going to go to the family thing and they’re going to have all kinds of treats. And if I don’t eat it, I’m missing out.”

Now, listen to me you guys, you are missing out on something in your life by making food the most important part of that event. I promise you, because my family goes for ice-cream all the time and I go with them and I almost never eat ice-cream. And do you know what has happened? I’ve started noticing how much I enjoy just going on that outing with my family, because I’m not distracted by ice-cream anymore.

Now, again, that might sound like a long ways off and I’m not telling you, you can’t have ice-cream with your family. But I don’t want you to feel like you have to have ice-cream to enjoy being there with them. I want you to just show yourself, just a couple of times that you can actually have an even more enjoyable experience without the food there to buffer away some of the joy. It really is possible. So just be onto yourself. I don’t want to miss out, it’s first of all a thought that’s coming from complete scarcity.

If you believe there’s plenty of happiness and goodness, and good times, and there will always be good food to eat, and we’ll always be able to find good food. This is one thing I’ve learned; there is no shortage of it. Then you can be okay with saying no from time to time. I’m going to help you do that over the next couple of months.

The other one I want to address here around this area of food is this idea that if I just love my body, if I accept my body as is, and I stop telling myself it’s terrible, and ugly, and fat, and all the mean things that you say about your body. If you just love your body then you’re just going to keep overeating. Guess what my friends? Overeating is not loving your body, your body doesn’t love it when you overeat, haven’t you noticed? You’re disconnecting from your body, if you haven’t noticed. You’re not connecting with your body.

When we love people, when we love human beings we connect with them. We don’t numb out ourselves and blocks ourselves out from them. So overeating, which you can define in a lot of different ways, but it’s consuming more food than you need or the kinds of food that don’t fuel your body. When we do that our bodies don’t feel good after. Our bodies are like okay, I’ve got to figure out what to do with all this extra food. And I just need a minute and it’s going to take me some time. And then eventually we process it through our bodies and we pack some of it on as fat.

That’s what the body’s supposed to do. Now, that’s not to judge yourself, you have good reason for all of it. But true body love is connecting with your body. True body love is I love you body, thanks for taking such good care of me. Thanks for allowing me to experience life in this way. You are amazing. And all that extra food I gave you, you stored as fat just like you’re supposed to. Good news, if we ever get stranded somewhere there’s no food, we’ve got some to live off of, thank you for doing that. That’s body love.

Then it’s hey body, I’m going to start taking care of you from now on. I’ve been sort of not paying attention to you. I’ve been taking care of the tongue part and the taste bud part, but that’s it.  And I’m done with that. I’m going to take care of all of you. So there’s times when I’m going to ask you to push yourself a little bit. I’m going to ask you to be a little bit hungry sometimes. I’m going to ask to try accessing some of that fat which I know is harder to do than just to get more fuel from outside.

But I believe in you, you can do it. And I’m not going to push you so far that you can’t handle it because I love you. That’s true body love. It has nothing to do with the way your body looks. This is what people tell me, “How do I love my body when I look in the mirror and I just can’t stand what I see?” And I’m like, “Well, do you ever see your kid first thing in the morning when they haven’t brushed their hair or their teeth, and they’re just kind of a mess? Do you think I just don’t know how I can love you as long as you look like that?”

No, you think I love you, get over here and give me a hug, little rug rat. It’s not about appearance when we truly love people. So your body, we do work on your thoughts about appearance too. But I like you to begin with this place of just connecting with your body, having healthy conversations with your body and really being there for your body.

So anyway like I said, I’ve got a lot more to teach you so if you’re not in Be Bold and you want to join us, you go to jodymoore.com/membership. I will tell you, this program we’re going to run through November and December and then it will disappear. So don’t miss it.

Alright you guys have an amazing rest of your week and I’ll see you soon.

Who is your life coach? If you don’t have one I would be so honored to be your coach. I created a virtual coaching program called Be Bold that I want to invite you to join me in. We can address challenges, we can work on goals, and we can do it in so many different ways.

We have group coaching, individual private coaching, and online chats along with hundreds of hours of courses and content that I’ve created just for you. When you’re ready to really take what you’re learning on the podcast to the 10x level, then come check out Be Bold at JodyMoore.com/membership.