The Empowered Catholic Podcast

Book of Romans! It's not an easy read! We will have a couple of episodes just on Chapter 8.

There's a lot of HOPE and assurances in Romans. There are many more themes, including patience and suffering. It's all going to be worth it, Paul says.

Chapter eight of Romans starts with this: Therefore there is no condemnation for those in the Messiah, Jesus.

Let's all make that a verse we remember, just like we remember John 3:16. No condemnation.

It's so easy for us to skip over it. To start thinking about all the reasons why we should, could, or might be condemned by God for acts or omissions. There's a big negativity bias in human nature.

It's natural for us to be concerned about our personal salvation. To worry about being condemned.

Paul's letter to the Romans provides the Roman Christians with a lot of assurances. One of Paul's assurances to them is that, since they are "in" the Messiah, there is no condemnation for them.

Spend a few moments with that.

Certainly we need to make strong efforts to "walk the talk." The book of Romans has themes that recall the Exodus story. We don't want to fall back into the spirit of slavery (like Israel in Egypt & the complainers that wanted to go back to it).

Paul, apparently, has scandalized others with this kind of talk "no condemnation" because he has addressed objections, earlier, in Chapter 5, where he says, at verse 15: "What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! "

I love what Fr. Jacques Phillipe says: "The reasons that we lose our peace are always bad reasons" (In Searching for and Maintaining Peace).

We can't let the world, our fear, our limitations, the devil, the whatever, rob us of our peace that we have in Christ Jesus.

We are doing the best we can in our Christian journey. We fall short. Regardless, there is no condemnation.

Hang onto your peace because there is no condemnation.

Peace will make you more powerful, effective, sane and healthy.

Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.

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Do you want her to hear you? You must hear her first.

Do you want him to see your perspective? You must see his perspective first.

Being SEEN and HEARD is important to any relationship that has depth and vitality.

The person in front of you has DIGNITY. God made him or her. Recognizing the dignity of the other person is your job. It's up to you.

When you are speaking with your young adults, and pretty much anyone, DO THIS: be on the lookout for how you validate them.

When they know YOU understand their perspective, and it's a perspective that makes a lot of sense, then they will be more open to seeing your perspective.

When she's telling you what she's thinking, feeling, and experiencing… then it's your turn to explain to HER why it's understandable that she's thinking, feeling, and experiencing that. Validation is about showing that, "Hey, considering your experiences, your perspective on life, what you've been through, and your values, it makes sense that you are thinking/feeling that way."

It takes some understanding. Perhaps you will need to ask a few questions so you can "get" the experience that they are having.

Listen to the podcast and get a sense of what the skill of "validation" is all about. Look for an opportunity to practice this skill in every conversation. The results will surprise you!

Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.

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Our children, at any age, are always hoping to feel loved by us.

Receiving love from your mom and dad is a primary psychological drive. It's a reason why psychologists are always trying to get you to straighten-out your relationships with your parents.

As parents, let's make sure we fulfill our role. It's our unique opportunity.

COLLABORATING will help you stay in that role.

Thinking in terms of COLLABORATING with your young adults during their transition to independence helps shift the relationship to a life-long, loving, adult, relationship.

Because collaboration means both parties are working together towards a shared goal.

Collaboration is sometimes a style of approaching a conflict. It's also a way of working towards shared goals.

Shifting to COLLABORATION is a BIG shift for most parents. We are deep into "control" or "advising". Collaboration is a motif for building the relationship while reaching shared goals.

"A summer job" is a shared goal when a parent is hoping their student will find a decent summer job. Hopefully the student is a self-starter, but she might need some ideas, some transportation, some boundaries around hours, to cooperate with the family vacation, or so forth.

A tip for being a great collaborator is: learn how to pursue an INTEREST instead of taking a POSITION.

Positions are the particular solution we propose; these serve a larger Interest. An Interest is the larger thing that you are trying to accomplish with your "position."

Listen to the podcast episode to hear more about the what, why, and how of collaboration.

Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.

Email us at: [email protected]

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What's the best way to give advice? Our young adults generally don't want to hear it. They've had plenty of it from us in the past.

They likely need lots of advice, however. Or could, at least, use some to avoid making costly mistakes.

There's also something that we often offer when we give the advice: it's something that they intensely dislike.

We discuss some of the biggest DO's and DON'Ts for managing our relationships with our young adults.

What's a story you have about successes or challenges in relating to your young adult children? We would love to hear from you!

Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.

Email us at: [email protected]

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Website: https://thmlcoaching.com/podcast/

There's a huge goal to never lose sight of when relating to your young adult! This huge goal is: to create a healthy and loving relationship with our adult children.

Our expectations of them can conflict with that goal. It's human nature to focus on what's NOT happening and to be impatient for what we think SHOULD be happening. We have expectations rooted in our own personal history. Let's bear in mind that the culture is not what it used to be. Life's path is less settled and predictable in terms of transitioning into independent adult roles. There's also lots of brain maturation still happening into the late twenties.

As parents, we are transitioning from a role of control (as if we ever really had that!) to a relationship of mutual respect and influence. It's up to us to model what mutual respect looks like. Our control of our children's outcomes, meaning the "results" they get, was always limited. Most parents need to consciously move away from taking responsibility for the outcomes their children have. And to release control to them for their experiences of being happy in their circumstances.

At the same time, our kids will ping pong from wanting to be fully independent to wanting us to step in with advice and solutions. They are in a big transition (see episode 2) and need some space to start working it out.

What's a story you have about successes or challenges in relating to your young adult children? We would love to hear from you!

Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.

Email us at: [email protected]

Facebook: The Catholic Midlife Podcast

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Website: https://thmlcoaching.com/podcast/

What's a story you have about life with your aging parents?

We would love to hear from you! Send a text to us at The Catholic Midlife podcast with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.

Email us at: [email protected]

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Website: https://thmlcoaching.com/podcast/

In the interview with Noreen

Noreen's email:

Website: www.noreenmcinnes.com

Facebook Page: @KeepatitRiley, https://www.facebook.com/KeepatitRiley.

Get her book, Keep At It Riley from https://www.newcitypress.com/keep-at-it-riley.html

or on Amazon

Create an ethic to strive for happiness.

Martin Seligman, the positive psychologist was out in his yard doing yard work. His daughter was maybe five or six. She said, "Daddy, do you remember when I was four? And I had to learn to stop whining and it was fairly hard for me, but I learned how to stop?"

Martin said, "Yes, I remember."

She said, "Well, I think if I could learn how to stop whining, you could learn how to stop being so grumpy."

He really took it to heart. He thought, "I could learn to be less grumpy and there's actually a lot of really good reasons why. I would want to do that."

Last week, in Episode 11, we talked about Seligman's model of happiness as having three levels: the pleasant life, the good life and the meaningful life. The meaningful life is generally associated with using your strengths, your best virtues, and your highest values in the service of something bigger than yourself.

I am sure that reminds you of something as a Catholic.

In Matthew, 22:37, Jesus says the first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and soul and mind. And the second is like unto it: love your neighbor as yourself.

It's funny how happiness and holiness coincide.

God made us for happiness. We want to be with Him. We want to be happy.

That great spiritual life wants to be integrated with the rest of you! Including with the mental and the emotional realms of you.

There are endless studies that show why it's great to be happy. To be happier. Happy people are healthier. They live longer. They overcome challenges better. They're more resilient. They have better relationships. They have more career success. They have less stress and anxiety.

You want to hang out with happy people. You probably wish the people around you were happier - it would make your own life better.

They likely have the same thought about you.

One of the biggest obstacles in spiritual life is discouragement. Happiness is a counter to discouragement. It requires us to trust in God, because that is fundamental for hope. Happiness requires hope that we are going somewhere, that what we do means something. That what we are experiencing will lead us to happiness.

Catholic philosopher Joseph Pieper wrote a treatise on hope. He says that one of the characteristics of a truly hopeful person is that they have a kind of youthful joy and experience of life that has an optimistic view. A perspective that lives life with a kind of a freshness of outlook and an interest and joy and awe and inspiration.

Let's strive for happiness. Let's find our hope and let's be those joyful people.

We would love to hear from you! Send us a text with your thoughts as you listen: 612-208-9150.

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Aquinas views the desire for happiness as ingrained in and being inseparable from, our humanity. We want to be with God because we desire happiness. We are made for Him.

There are some schools of thought based on an idea that we should be disinterested in happiness and entirely focused on serving God and others. That's not how human nature works.

Happiness is sometimes used to refer to just feeling good or pursuing pleasure. We are talking about something broader than that.

Humans are pretty good at giving up a short-term pleasure in favor of more fulfilling activities. Think in those terms.

We are embodied persons, not spiritual machines. There's a mental and emotional life that we want to have in alignment with our spiritual life.

Here's a perspective on happiness offered by positive psychologist Martin Seligmann. He suggests three levels that exist simultaneously for us:

The Pleasant Life - appreciating basic pleasures like companionship, our environment, and our bodily needs.

The Good Life - creatively using our unique virtues and strengths to enhance our lives.

The Meaningful Life - fulfillment in employing our unique strengths for a purpose greater than ourselves.

We all need to learn to set the pleasant life aside for something bigger. Hopefully we learn this before we waste a lot of time pursuing pleasure to the exclusion of the bigger picture.

At the same time, remember that the pleasant life has a role to play in contributing to what it means to be a flourishing human. To be a human that can live up to his or her potential. That gets things done. That is effective. That wants to be here.

Give the pleasant life some respect. It has a role to play for you.

The good life is about engaging character strengths, those virtues and talents that you have, those things you like to use when you're doing good - when you're making things happen, and accomplishing things. When you are using your strengths, it's helpful to create engagement - that sense of being involved, of making a good effort.

Everyone has things they do well. Leverage those if you want the good life. It creates a lot of satisfaction. If you feel like a cog in the machine, it's tough to show up at your best.

Engagement is often overlooked when we are thinking about "what's missing" in life. We often have pretty good intuition about other factors. When the activity is engaging you in a worthy challenge aligned with your values and virtues, it starts "pulling you in," and you are likely in a role where you are effective and have enjoyment or at least satisfaction.

The meaningful life involves living with purpose and meaning; connecting your strengths, your values, and who you are, to something that's bigger than yourself, and making a contribution to something bigger than you. This requires action.

Focusing on your strengths, your values, and your highest purposes is so helpful. If you are focused on somebody else's values, or what somebody else thinks is what you "should" be doing, it starts to feel like you are living somebody else's life. That you lack choice.

God made you uniquely and for purposes that you and He will work out. Fitting into someone else's schema for your life is not such a great plan. Because you were made to freely choose. It's up to you. You have to own this and step into it.

Nobody will do this "for" you. You do it.

Listen to the podcast, we had a fun convo on these topics.

Take a quick moment to email a friend and tell them to check out The Catholic Midlife podcast. They can easily find it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and most major platforms.

We would love to hear from you!

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It is important as spiritual beings, as Christians, and Catholics to strive for happiness. And we can make a lot of choices for it that are perfectly in alignment with our highest values and everything we believe. Happiness helps us be what God intends. We use the word "happiness" to refer to thriving, flourishing, and cooperating with grace. Purpose has an important role to play in happiness.

You have spiritual, mental, and emotional components: you want these things to be in congruence because you want all that awesome Catholic and interior spiritual life to flow through you without getting derailed by the mental and emotional aspects, which are very much a part of you.

It's actually disturbing how many people get to midlife and say, I've been doing this thing for so many years and actually it's not aligned with who I am. And gosh, now that I think about it, it really is affecting my happiness in life - my flourishing, my thriving.

If you are trying to create a sense of purpose, think in terms of action that connects you to something bigger than yourself.

Don't get pulled into our "success" culture and think you need to be doing some "big" thing. God loves you and we don't think His ideas of what's "big" or "small" don't match very well with our own ideas. Love has its own calculus.

We would love to hear from you!

Email: [email protected]

Text or Leave a Voice Message: 612-208-9150

Facebook: The Catholic Midlife Podcast

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecatholicmidlife/

Website: https://thmlcoaching.com/podcast/

We would love to hear from you!

Email: [email protected]

Text or Leave a Voice Message: 612-208-9150

Facebook: The Catholic Midlife Podcast

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thecatholicmidlife/

Website: https://thmlcoaching.com/podcast/