Are you exhausted from people pleasing? Do you feel resentful, unappreciated, or emotionally drained from always saying yes?

In this episode, Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom, reveals why people pleasing is not a personality flaw and not a boundary problem. It is a thinking problem.

If you have been told you just need better boundaries, stronger scripts, or the courage to say no more often, this conversation will completely reframe how you see yourself and others.

Through a powerful story from Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend, Audrey explains why tactics alone fail and why true personal power comes from principle based living. You will learn:

At the heart of healthy boundaries is this truth: you cannot teach others how to treat you properly until you know how to treat yourself properly.

When you shift from scripts and strategies to internal character work, everything changes. You stop negotiating for approval and start living from truth. You stop reacting and start leading.

If you are a mom who feels overwhelmed by demands, decision fatigue, or ungrateful responses, this episode will give you clarity and direction.

Make sure you are on our email list to register for the upcoming free training where Audrey will teach you how to uncover actionable principles for your specific struggles and start living them immediately. www.themissiondrivenmom.com

Subscribe for more principle based leadership, motherhood development, and character driven personal growth.

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AI GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to the podcast. I am Audrey Reba, author of the Mission Driven Life and founder of the Mission Driven Mom. Today, I want you to know that people pleasing is not a personality flaw. It is not something that is wrong with you. It is a thinking problem. I am going to show you one principle and it is going to completely reframe how you relate to yourself and others without turning you into someone else.

This is going to be really awesome. So I am going to start by reading you this story about Stan.

Stan was confused. He read in the Bible and was taught in church that it was more blessed to give than to receive. But he found that this often was not true. He frequently wished people would have more consideration for his time and energy. Yet whenever someone wanted something from him, he would do it.

He thought this was loving and he wanted to be a loving person. Finally, when the fatigue grew into depression, he came to see me. This is one of the authors telling this story as a therapist. When I asked what was wrong, Stan replied that he was quote loving too much. How can you love too much, I asked. I have never heard of such a thing.

Oh, it is very simple, said Stan. I do far more for people than I should, and that makes me very depressed. Is that sad. But yeah. Ironically true. Do we as moms just want to say this sometimes, that we do more for people than we should and it makes us depressed. It is just so ironic.

The therapist goes on. I am not quite sure what you are doing, I said, but it certainly is not love. The Bible says that true love leads to a blessed state and a state of cheer. Love brings happiness, not depression. If your loving is depressing you, it is probably not love.

I do not see how you can say that, Stan replied. I do so much for everyone. I give and give. How can you say that I am not loving.

I can say that because of the fruit of your actions, you should be feeling happy, not depressed.

So he says he asked him to tell him some of the things that he did for people, and he learned a lot about his doing and sacrificing from Stan.

Now, what is so interesting about this story is that I work with a lot of women, obviously, and often they will get into the academy, lets say, and just for everyones information, we do talk about boundaries, but not until near the end of level two.

And it is near the end of level two for a very important reason, and that is because of a principle I am going to talk to you about in just a minute.

So these women come in to level one and they do not just immediately learn about boundaries, but they are unhappy, they are unfulfilled, and they think they have a perception that other people in their life are causing the problem, that other people in their life need to be different.

And that if those other people were different, then they would not have these problems.

When they try to be really conscientious and honest, they start looking inside and being like, okay, maybe other people are not the problem. Maybe actually I am the problem and I am the problem because I need to have better boundaries.

And that is what the world and people around me keep telling me. The problem is that you do not have good enough boundaries, and they expect to come into the academy and to increase their personal power immediately by being trained on boundaries, so sometimes they are disappointed.

Then I do not teach them about boundaries right out the gate.

And then what I watch them do oftentimes is okay, she is not teaching me about boundaries and I am going to keep going with this academy because I think it would be a good thing. But in the meantime I am just going to tell everybody no, because that is what they think boundaries is.

In other words, they think that boundaries is a whole bunch of fences, maybe really tall fences, maybe wrought iron, maybe stone, and you get those fences up as tall and as strong as possible and keep everybody off your property and then you will feel better.

But boundaries are just lines drawn, and they can be subtle and even fences need gates, right. People need to be able to come and go.

So last week we were talking about tactics versus principles, and we were talking about character versus personality ethic and how the world has moved more and more in the direction, especially in the west, especially in America, more and more toward this personality ethic, tactic based way of being.

And you can tell this in some of the things that go on. You need to do this neurolinguistic training. You need to brainwash yourself. You need to this, that, or the other.

And it is not as if some of those things do not work. If they did not work, people would not use them. And it is not as if the people that promote those are bad or have bad intentions. We talked about this last week.

It is just that those people do not understand that if you do not work on character first, that all the personality ethics in the world will not get you across the finish line.

Eventually you will, in a crisis situation, it will come back to who you really are.

In todays world there is a lot of this language about being performative, and everything we do in society is just performative and it is not really who we are. We are just always playing a role. We are just always acting a part in this big play of life.

But there are some things that are solid, that are lasting, that are meaningful, that we can lean on. These principles, these immutable truths, and integrating them into our basic being and developing our character is one of those things that we can depend on.

Because when we become a certain kind of person by integrating those principles, as Covey talked about, that the integration of correct principles into our basic nature is what makes lasting success and happiness possible.

That is what we want to do.

Now, I want to tell you something even more fascinating.

Stan is super confused. He is super unhappy. He is people pleasing like crazy.

And you and I as mothers probably would not say it quite like Stan, that everybody needs to get off our back. But boy, when you are a mom of young kids, or you are a mom of adult kids, or you are a grandma, people need things from you a lot.

And you are constantly in decision mode and trying to discern who to give what and when to say yes or no.

And that decision exhaustion is real.

And when people do not thank you a lot, in fact, when you, in your best intentions, try to help and then someone is ungrateful or angry or aggressive, it is devastating.

I was teaching a workshop last night, the sneak peek for our Mothers of Creation event that is going to happen in the fall. And one of the women, we were talking about victim types and one of the women talked about a friend of hers who had a child do something that really disappointed her. And so she quote put herself to bed for three months.

And so this is the point at which it could go. This is how far this can go. Like we can really turn our lives upside down because of what other people are doing, and we just do not want to do that.

We just do not want to be at the mercy of other peoples decisions, and we do not want to be these people pleasers all the time.

And it is really important to understand that truth is truth and truth can make you free.

I am going to show you in just a minute how you will be on a completely different trajectory when I teach you this one principle. It will really start to get you on a different path if people pleasing is a problem for you or someone that you love and you are struggling because other people around you are not being grateful and they are asking too much from you.

And your strategy so far has just been to say no a lot.

What are you going to do.

And remember we talked about how a lot of these current things, people do not have the education to be able to discern principles for themselves.

The story that I told you is drawn from probably the most definitive source on boundaries. It is called Boundaries by Cloud and Townsend. And I think they are incredible. I am very grateful for their work. I think that they do incredible good in the world, and that they are very mission centered individuals that are really out there doing all kinds of good.

But I want to make one point here about even the best source by people who are trying to be God centered and mission centered, who have incredible educations.

Both of the authors have doctorate degrees and they have been doing this work for a very long time.

In this big definitive book on boundaries, there is only one chapter that attempts to teach principles. It is actually only one section, I think maybe it is one chapter in one section of the book, and they call it the 10 Laws of Boundaries.

They are good, solid truths in a sense, but they are actually just concepts, not principles. They are not actionable principles.

For example, the story I just gave you was law number five, the Law of Motivation. But then they told the story of Stans people pleasing, and then they talked about how Stan was afraid, and he was motivated by his fear.

We might be motivated by lots of other things.

And so then they go on to share, they say some things that we could be afraid of and some things that could be motivating us, and then talk about how we need to have the right motivations.

I am still at a bit of a loss. I still do not have an actionable principle. I still do not actually know what to do.

This is why we have fine tuned this process and we not only teach the law of nature and that ancient framework and principles and how they are immutable truths, we learn how to write actionable principles because that is the only way you know what to do.

Here is another one, the Law of Evaluation. There is a page or two description, still do not really know what to do, and I had to go back and read and reread these and then try to write my own principles around them and still struggled to do that.

So even in the best source, with a million or more copies sold, being the definitive source, going around teaching all these workshops, they do a lot of good and they help a lot of people, but they are also really caught up in a lot of applications and tactics.

And if they knew better how to write actionable principles for us and delineate those more clearly, we could think about our own applications.

So the most important principle about boundaries that I have ever learned did not actually come directly from them, and when I share this principle with you, it will reframe, I hope, the way that you see yourself and the way that you see others and the way that you manage your people pleasing.

Because at the very heart of boundaries, and there are a few other actionable principles we can flesh out around boundaries, and we do get to that eventually, and I am going to explain to you in a minute why we get to that only eventually in the academy, because boundaries are very simple.

Boundaries are simply teaching other people how to treat you properly.

As human beings, we tend to test limits. We tend to push boundaries. We tend to want to get away with what we want to get away with, partly just because we are lazy and it is hard work to live with intention all the time.

And it is hard work to treat people the way that we ought to treat them.

And we do not want to have to do a job or a task or whatever the case might be.

And so we do not treat others the way that they should be treated all the time, or even most of the time.

And in order for us to have proper working relationships, we must teach each other how they need to treat us.

And when we have done a good, thorough job of teaching other people how to treat us properly, then other people can choose whether or not they want to honor what we have taught them.

And that teaching can happen bit by bit. It can happen informally. It happens in a million ways. It happens with looks and body language and words and actions.

But when we understand that is what we are doing, that in order to have proper boundaries we have to teach other people, it is a teaching, it is an active role, it is a choice we are making, it is an ongoing process, and the onus is on us.

To do it right. To do it kindly.

But here is where it really gets better.

You and I cannot actually teach other people how to treat us properly unless we first know how to treat ourselves properly.

Unless and until we treat ourselves properly, we will not have the clarity or the confidence or the language or the ability or the inner strength or the courage to teach others how to do it.

If we cannot or will not treat ourselves properly, it becomes more and more difficult to expect others to.

Because why would they treat us better than we treat ourselves.

Now, sometimes people do. Sometimes there are really Christ like people in the world and they treat others properly because of who they are. And we love those people and we are grateful for those people.

But normally, on the day to day, it is up to us to teach others, and that means that we start by treating ourselves properly.

And that does not mean indulgence.

One of my favorite things that C S Lewis ever said is that most people do not want a father in heaven. They want a grandfather in heaven.

And he just meant that we want all of our wounds bandaged up. We want to be sent on the playground to have a good time. We want to have the lollipops and the candies and desserts. We do not want to eat our vegetables because that is what a father makes us do.

A father disciplines us. A father teaches us what is right and wrong. A father expects us to do what is right or to take the consequences.

And so even though treating ourselves properly sometimes means recreation and leisure and having fun, it also means disciplining ourselves.

Like in the words of Laura Ingalls, I must make myself mind myself.

That is where we get at an actionable principle.

I must treat myself the way I expect others to treat me.

And that is a jumping off place for a myriad of actionable things.

Okay, what would that mean.

That means I need to listen to my conscience better.

That means I need to take care of my body, my mind, my soul, and my emotions.

It leads to all sorts of better behaviors that then build the reserves and the confidence.

By taking loving actions towards ourselves, we like ourselves more. We learn to love ourselves. The feelings of love and liking follow. They come after the loving proper actions, the making ourselves mind ourselves, the putting proper boundaries in place by treating ourselves properly.

And this is why when you begin to think in principles, stuff that was so ethereal and confusing to you before just snaps right into focus.

When we began this podcast and I talked to you about getting over your people pleasing, you might have had a myriad of solutions you thought I was going to give you about how you were going to sit down and have conversations or tell people this or that other thing, or tell people no, or set a better schedule, or a million tactics that you might be hearing out there in the world.

But actually it all comes back to you.

In a future podcast, I am going to talk more about this and why that matters so much, and this is exactly why our academy is built the way that it is built, because the foundation of all your other relationships is your relationship with yourself.

And that core truth puts everything into clearer perspective.

Now you know that if you struggle with people pleasing, you have an actionable principle you can take right now, and you can begin to work on your relationship with yourself.

You can treat yourself better knowing that as you do, you will have the strength and the confidence and the clarity to expect others and to teach them with kindness because they do not always know.

And as you change and you want them to change toward you, you will have to kindly teach them that kind of thing is not allowed.

For example, how you talk to yourself.

If you do not want others to talk badly to you, you should probably start talking better to yourself.

Because you need to treat yourself the way that you would treat someone that you love.

And when you do that, you can tell others not to talk to you that way because that is not how people talk to you, including you.

So this shift increases your personal power when you lean into truth and not tactics.

You are liberated to know what to do, to know how to practice.

There is a myriad of actions that you can take from this podcast, from this one principle that you can begin to put into action.

And as you work on loving yourself properly, as you treat yourself the way that you deserve to be treated, you simply communicate that to other people.

Oh, we do not talk that way to me.

Oh, we do not demand things of me.

Oh, we honor my schedule.

Oh, that is something that you need to do.

And of course there are other principles of boundaries and there are, in a collaborative relationship, and you need to learn those and you can learn those.

But unless the foundation is in place, the others will fall apart.

Because when you get in a pinch and when things get rough, just like I said before, it will all fall back on the person you have become.

The principles that you have integrated into your basic character will be who you are, and that is what you will fall back on in a crisis or in a hard situation, or when you are being called upon by someone to do something that makes you feel uncomfortable.

You will not cut corners anymore.

You will not let people take advantage of you.

You will not do things that go against your conscience when you are around other people.

Because you will treat yourself the way that you need to be treated, and this is why tactics fail with boundaries scripts.

You say this and then they say this.

Or just say these affirmations to yourself.

Or just do these simple things.

It is truth versus approval.

It is that personal empowerment, becoming the authority in your own life, becoming the expert in your own life, and living the principles that cause you to work on you first and healing yourself internally, not just behaviorally.

The answers are not out there. They are not in the words that you say in the way that you navigate these relationships. They are about what happens to you internally.

And when you shift the focus from people pleasing and trying to negotiate those relationships out there to how you treat yourself better, parenting yourself, guiding yourself with good principles and practices, everything begins to shift.

And in this free training that I am going to be teaching you soon, I am going to walk you through how to uncover principles like this for your specific struggles.

And I am going to teach you how to start living them immediately.

Make sure you are on our email list and you get registered for that free training.

Because I really want to have you there so that I can give you these tools and skills.

I can help you shift your thinking forever so that you can have truth make you free.

Thanks for joining me. I will see you next time.

If you have ever thought…

“Why am I still struggling? I’ve tried so many different things and none of them create lasting change.”

This week’s podcast episode is one you’re going to want to tune into 👀

What I’m going to show you may completely change how you see every book, course, therapist, podcast, and program you’ve ever tried.

Let’s face it: 

Most growth systems aren’t failing because they’re wrong.

They’re failing because they’re incomplete.

Hit play on this week's podcast episode to take a step closer towards being the expert of your own life!

Hop on our list to get access to the upcoming free class and Discover how the 7 Laws of Life Mission Can Transform You! https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com

Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Reba, author of The Mission-Driven Life and founder of The Mission-Driven Mom. I’m so excited for you to join me today.

I want you to understand that most growth systems—the programs that you join, the therapy that you go to, the courses that you take, the conventions that you attend—aren’t failing because they’re wrong, but because they’re incomplete.

And today I want to talk to you about why tactics without principles will always keep you cycling through solutions, and why learning how to think is way more important than learning what to do.

What we experience a lot as women and mothers is that we try to solve problems in silos.

For example, we have a marriage problem. Things aren’t going well in our marriage, so we go to marriage therapy. Or parenting isn’t going well, so we go to a parenting seminar or a convention, or we buy some parenting books. Or our finances are a bit of a mess, so we sign up for or listen to Dave Ramsey.

Or we need to fix our health, so we go out and get a health coach or a gym pass.

These aren’t bad things to do. It’s not that they’re not going to help you. It’s not that these people don’t have good ideas, and it’s not that they’re trying to do something wrong. It’s just that they don’t have a principled approach—even when they might think that they do.

The parenting example that I gave last podcast is a perfect example of how this happens. Remember when I told you about the moms that bought the book and they all read it, and their takeaway was, “When our kids argue, we need to let them argue and ignore them,” and then it made things worse in their homes?

They had trusted an authority. They had leaned into that authority. This person had, I don’t know, some kind of doctorate degree or something, seemed like they really knew what they were talking about. This book had been popular or whatever the situation was, and they didn’t know how to discern for themselves what the best actions would be.

So they took that person’s advice at face value, and it exploded in their faces.

This is very much like when Blaine and I went to marriage therapy. Things were bad. We knew that they were bad. And, you know, bless him, he wanted to show me that he intended to stay together and that he loved me, and so he signed us up and we went.

But literally, I can remember two helpful things from almost a year of meeting every week with this woman.

One was that I cared way too much what people thought. That was actually legitimately helpful. It was an insight into myself that helped me to reallocate my values and be more careful about that kind of thing.

And then the other thing I remember—the only other thing—was this scale she gave us as she taught us how to use a scale from one to ten to plan the dates that we would go on sometimes.

And honestly, other than that, we spent a year— I don’t even know what we spent back then. A hundred, a hundred and twenty dollars a session. It’s now like a hundred and fifty a session. I mean, you do the math—four or five thousand dollars. I don’t even know what it was that we spent with her—and she did not know how to help us.

Now, as a side note here, I have a husband who has a marriage and family therapy degree from Liberty University, which is a great school. But we watched him go through that program. We saw the things he was doing for his coursework.

There are some good books that came out of that, some good advice that came out of that. But fundamentally, they were throwing things at the students. Many of the students seemed like they were broken themselves and were there because they needed their own healing. They did not seem like they were in a position to really help other people.

And he came out of there still not really having any idea how to do therapy and how to help someone.

Now, you can go get training and apprenticeship and all of that kind of thing. And I know that some people are very gifted. I’m not saying that it’s not helpful.

I’m just saying that we give a lot of credence to what they say. We try that before a lot of other things—or instead of other things. And there’s a reason why it’s not always helpful.

These people don’t always have the training that we think they have. They don’t always have the knowledge and wisdom we think they have. And we aren’t good at discerning what they’re telling us to do.

We cycle through these different solutions. We try different things. What we don’t realize is that these things have a lot of overlap, and that trying to solve our problems in silos is just going to keep us cycling.

We can have an insight here or there. We can have a little paradigm shift. We can get some help. But fundamentally, we aren’t actually changed.

We aren’t actually seeing the world differently. We aren’t actually behaving differently with a fundamentally different perception of ourselves and the world—a different way of thinking and being.

And we absolutely have to get to that point if we’re going to become the experts in our own lives.

This is because there’s a huge difference between principles and applications.

Principles are governing truths.

Applications are situational behaviors.

Not all of the applications—and in fact, not most of other people’s applications or suggestions—are going to work for me most of the time. They’re just not.

And so there’s a ton of voices out there. There has never been a time in the history of the world that can even touch this information age in terms of all of the stuff you’re being fed nonstop.

It is exhausting to navigate.

None of us are properly prepared for it. And unfortunately, we’re even less prepared because of the things that have been taken away from us that would have helped us prepare.

This is the difference between classical education or liberal arts education and modern education.

I’m going to tell you a story from Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. If you’ve followed me very long, you know he’s a favorite.

When Dr. Covey was working on his doctorate, he studied the success literature published in the United States since 1776. He read hundreds of books, articles, and essays in fields such as self-improvement, popular psychology, and self-help.

And he noticed something startling.

The literature from the first 150 years focused on what he called the character ethic—things like integrity, humility, fidelity, courage, justice, patience, industry, simplicity, modesty, and the Golden Rule.

But the literature from the last 50 years focused on what he called the personality ethic—quick fixes, social image, influence techniques, positive thinking, communication skills.

And he said much of that later literature was superficial. It addressed acute problems temporarily but left the chronic root problems untouched.

That’s what happened in our marriage.

The therapist wanted to teach us communication techniques. And it’s not that communication isn’t helpful. But they’re techniques—not truths.

We had deeper issues. How we saw ourselves. How we saw each other. What we took responsibility for. What we blamed each other for.

One of my favorite quotes by Henry David Thoreau says:

“For every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, one is hacking at the root.”

That’s what we’re trying to do. Hack at the root.

Most self-help systems are hacking at the leaves. They don’t know how to get to the root because they don’t have the tools or the paradigm to do it.

Covey explains that the character ethic teaches that there are basic principles of effective living, and that people can only experience true success and enduring happiness as they learn and integrate these principles into their character.

But before you can live them, you have to recognize them.

And in this flood of information, how are you going to recognize them unless you have discernment skills?

Years ago, I was in a bookstore looking for a copy of a book with wide margins so I could write in it.

I wanted to highlight. Take notes. Write my thoughts. Have a conversation with the author.

The salesgirl asked me why I wanted wide margins. I told her I wanted to write my thoughts in the book.

And she said, “Oh, I can’t trust my thoughts.”

It was such a powerful moment.

She didn’t mean she had evil thoughts. She meant she had been schooled to believe that the professor knows better than her. That authorities know better. That she shouldn’t trust her own thinking.

We are trained to write about what authorities think—not what we think. We’re never writing to ourselves or developing our own discernment.

And that has left us unprepared.

Our modern education trained us for careers.

But it did not prepare us for the areas where we will find the greatest fulfillment, meaning, and joy in life.

If we don’t know how to use lifelong learning to discern truth and integrate it into our character, we are truly unprepared.

Imagine what it would feel like to be the authority in your own life.

To have tools.

To have discernment.

To have confidence and peace.

To listen to doctors and experts—but bring it back to truth and make your own grounded decisions.

First, you identify truth.

Then you learn it.

Then you live it.

Then it liberates you.

I have an upcoming free training where I’m going to show you how to stop outsourcing authority and start discerning truth for yourself.

You are not meant to be stuck.

You are meant to become the expert in your own life.

If you’re not on the list, get on the list so you can be notified when registration opens. It’s free. It’s happening in a few weeks.

I’m super excited about it. We’ve been working on it for a long time, and I hope it gives you what you need to turn a corner and start trusting your own ability to discern and discover truth for yourself.

Thank you so much for being here, and I’ll see you next time.

If you feel like you’ve tried everything - books, courses, therapy, church, conferences - and you’re still feeling stuck, overwhelmed, and unsure of yourself, this episode is for you.

In this episode, we explore why so many sincere, hardworking moms feel and you still feel stuck, overwhelmed, unsure of yourself, and frustrated…

and why it’s not because you aren’t trying hard enough. 

We talk about the difference between advice and principles, why modern self-help often leaves us frustrated, and how learning to discern truth can radically change the way you see yourself, your relationships, and your direction.

This episode is an invitation to stop outsourcing your life, learn how to think differently, and step into your role as the expert in your own life.

I’m so glad you’re here.

Enjoy the episode! 

Welcome to the Mission-Driven Mom Podcast. This podcast is for moms just like you who want to learn how to glorify God through finding and embracing true principles, discovering and developing your greatest gifts, and using them to serve your family and community.

Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Ocker, author of The Mission-Driven Life and founder of The Mission-Driven Mom. If you are a woman who has tried everything—if you feel like you’re doing everything right to the best of your ability and trying really hard—if you’re reading books, signing up for online courses, in therapy, or going to conferences, and you still feel unsure of yourself, stuck, frustrated, and overwhelmed, then I want to tell you—I want to reassure you—that it is not your fault.

Most women don’t struggle because they don’t try hard or because they’re not sincere. Most women actually try genuinely really hard, and they’re quite teachable and ready to learn and ready to change when they just know the right path to take. It’s not because of your lack of effort; it’s because you don’t have the proper tools.

And I know a lot of people tell you that, and I know that sounds like the song and dance of so many people online. But I’m here to tell you there’s something very ancient that’s going to feel very new—something that can radically change your trajectory in life because it radically changed mine, and it’s helped hundreds and hundreds of women who have gone through our program.

I’m going to explain why you’ve done all the things you knew to do and you’ve given life your best effort, but you’ve been left very unprepared. And if you’re anything like me, you feel cheated—because you genuinely tried your best, and life has just left you hanging. You just don’t feel prepared for this super important moment in your life.

And you probably feel powerless, even though you’re trying super hard.

So recently someone asked me, “Why do women feel so stuck? Especially moms—why do we feel like this?” And if you’re anything like I was, you keep waiting for the next resource, and you have tried so many things. You’ve probably tried spiritual things—not to say that God wasn’t there or didn’t love you, and not to say that going to church isn’t incredibly helpful.

You absolutely need those things, and you’ve tried them, and they’ve helped—but you’re still not there. Maybe you tried the next level of education, but you’re still not there. And you get to this point—you kind of hit this wall like I did—where you realize it doesn’t work. I keep doing all the things that the world tells me to do, and they just don’t help.

In fact, sometimes they can actually make things worse.

I knew a group of women who wanted to improve their parenting. Things weren’t going well at their houses, so they found a parenting book, and they all decided to read it and do whatever the book said. And I don’t know exactly how this author said it, but one of their primary takeaways from this book was that if their children fought with each other and struggled, they should simply ignore them—that if they left it alone, somehow the kids would just work it out.

And guess what? Things got worse at their houses because they didn’t have the ability to discern—to discern truth from error—and to live according to principles.

Now, you and I both know that what we really want is the ability to discern, to discern truth, to have confidence in our own decisions, and to be able to look out into the culture and not be repeatedly overwhelmed and confused by it. And what happens is we go out there, we try to find answers, and the world says all sorts of things.

It says, “Follow your dreams.”

It says, “Do what you love.”

It says, “Ask yourself what you want.”

And those are all the wrong answers. I’m telling you.

In fact, I’ll give you one quick example. My daughter is a senior in high school, and she’s making decisions about what’s coming in her future. And some things didn’t work out in the last couple of years the way that she hoped they would have. So she’s not where she thought she would be, and that’s been overwhelming and frustrating.

We were having a conversation about something in her life, and she was trying to make an important decision about what she’s going to do. And her comment was, “Well, I just don’t know what I want.”

And I know she’s getting that everywhere in the world. Everybody’s asking her, “What do you want? What do you want? What do you want?” And I said, “You know, that’s not a very good question because it’s not a principled question.”

The right question is, “What could I do that would make me feel good about myself?”

That’s a way better question.

So when you listen to the world and follow its advice, it often wreaks havoc. I mean, there are people in my life right now that I can think of—either they or someone they know made decisions based on those questions: “What do you want?” “Who are you?” Blah, blah, blah. And it did not work out well. In some cases, it really shattered lives.

That’s so unfortunate.

But there was a woman who, a few years ago, knew about the Academy. She didn’t really want to do it. And she had someone in her neighborhood who did the program, and this friend had mentioned to her a couple of times, “You know, this is really benefiting my life. I’m really learning to think differently. I’m really learning to see the world differently.”

And this woman—we’ll call her Sally—told her friend, “You know, I don’t need more self-help in my life. I don’t need more people telling me what to do because all I do is try stuff, and then it doesn’t work. And every time I read that stuff or try that stuff, it just makes me feel worse about myself.”

And she’s not the only one. A lot of women have said this kind of thing.

But luckily, her friend prevailed. Her friend was able to share enough information with her that it convinced Sally she should get involved.

And ironically, Sally was in a marriage and a life that actually, from the outside, looked very put together. Sally was the kind of woman who had been to quite a bit of college herself, whose husband was a brilliant and successful entrepreneur. They had several small, beautiful children. They were religiously affiliated. They were actually very beautiful people.

They had a lot of friendships. They had connections in the community. And even in their mid-thirties, they were very financially successful. They had a big, beautiful home and lots of extended family connections. Their life looked very put together.

It looked like they had everything going for them.

And yet this woman, Sally, was silently crying inside. She had been on the brink of divorce for years. The people closest to her knew this, but many other people didn’t. And she just kept saying, “He doesn’t spend enough time at home, and we just can’t get along. I just think divorce is the only answer for us.”

In the meantime, she had, unfortunately, these bad thoughts about herself—why didn’t she have her life put together when all these other people on social media looked like they had their lives put together?

And it was such a painful situation—to have everybody looking at her life thinking it was so perfect, and yet knowing that deep down inside there was real trouble. She didn’t know how to navigate it. She didn’t really like herself. She didn’t really know herself. She didn’t really love herself. And her marriage was unhappy—she was very unfulfilled in her marriage.

She got involved with the Academy, and as she learned to see herself differently, as she learned these tools that I learned, as she gained knowledge about what truth is and how it makes us free, she came to understand a very important principle.

That principle was that she was expecting her husband to meet needs that she could only meet for herself, and that she had been silently blaming him for many, many years for problems in their relationship where it was actually not his responsibility to fix those things for her.

In fact, he couldn’t do those things for her.

As she learned to think differently about herself, to think differently about her husband, and to think differently about their relationship—as she saw truth and practiced it—everything changed.

Later on, someone in her life asked her, “How is your marriage?” And she said, “Oh, it’s night-and-day different. It is so much better, so much happier, and so much more fulfilling.”

And they asked her, “Why? What changed?”

She said, “I did this program, and I learned to see him and myself through the lens of truth.” She didn’t say it quite like that, but that’s essentially what happened.

And she said, “I learned that I need to care for myself and not blame him when I don’t feel the way I want to feel.”

So transformational.

That’s the difference between information and advice versus principles—because principles are timeless truths that work every time for everyone. And it’s so important that we understand the difference.

That’s how we learn to discern. That’s how we begin to understand how we can actually transform situations permanently—because principles are timeless. They never change, and they always work.

You and I are not above or below the truth. The truth is always available to us, and it will always make us free.

We haven’t been given the tools. We don’t understand what they are. We don’t know how to identify them, how to latch onto them, and how to utilize them to be set free.

Our modern education and self-help culture really focus on tactics. They focus on coping and symptom management predominantly.

That’s not to say that these programs or therapists don’t ever say something that is true, timeless, and helpful. But their inability—and our inability—to properly identify principles, to call them out clearly, and to discern them for ourselves is crippling everyone.

Because principles actually help us govern reality. And they work even when we believe they won’t.

Most women have never been taught this because our education system doesn’t teach it anymore. And we are outsourcing all the pieces of our lives to authorities. We can’t be the experts in our own lives if we don’t know how to discern what we’re being told—even by the best authorities in the world.

And I could tell you all kinds of stories. I think I recently told you—I can’t remember if I shared it on the podcast or not—the story of taking my daughter to two different professionals for her ankle when it was injured.

One doctor told us she needed major surgery—a false ligament put in—with a year-long recovery. The other doctor said he could do a quick cleanup, do PRP therapy, and she’d be back in the gym.

And guess what? The second doctor was right. And that’s the one we went with.

That’s not to say the first doctor couldn’t have been right as well. But how do you discern as a mom? How do you make the decision? How do you know who to listen to? How do you sort through all these authorities?

And I’ll tell you what—I’ve mentioned this before, and we’re going to talk about this more this year, and I hope to get some experts on the show to talk to us too—but the feminist movement did us very few favors.

You might make the case that it helped equalize some pay scales and opened up job opportunities for women. But fundamentally, it did a lot of damage to our psyche—to how we think about ourselves and how we manage ourselves in the world.

So that’s why I can tell you with absolute confidence: if you are feeling stuck and frustrated, it is not your fault. Even though you’re putting in all the effort and trying all these different resources, there are fundamental reasons those resources aren’t working for you.

You don’t need to be more motivated.

You don’t need to try harder.

You don’t need to overhaul your life.

You need to learn how to see and think differently.

In a few weeks, I’m going to be offering a free class where we’ll dive deeper into these concepts. We’ll have time for me to share key stories, teach important ideas, and show you how you can change your life—how you can really turn that corner you’ve been wanting to turn.

You can begin to feel powerful and like the expert in your own life through some small changes that I’m going to show you.

I would really love for you to be there. And if you’re not on our email list, make sure you get on it. You can get the free audiobook right now, or you can simply opt in so that when registration opens for this free class, you’ll be there.

We can spend the time we need to deep dive into all of this, and I can give you the tools and resources you need so that life can be better and this pain can end.

Thank you so much for joining me today, and I will see you next time.

What happens after the kids leave home?

In this episode of the Mission-Driven Mom Podcast, Audrey sits down with Suzy Mighell, founder of Empty Nest Blessed and Empty Nest Blessed: 60 Days to Finding Joy in the Empty Nest. It's available HERE.

Together, they explore why the empty nest isn’t a destination—it’s a dynamic season of growth—and how women can move from loss and uncertainty into clarity, peace, and mission. Suzy shares the wisdom she’s gained from more than a decade of walking alongside thousands of women, as well as practical guidance for parenting adult children, releasing unhealthy expectations, and rediscovering who you are beyond motherhood.

_____________________________________________________

Empty Nest Blessed: 60 Days to Finding Joy in the Empty Nest. It's available  HERE.

(Available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook)

Audrey: Welcome back to the podcast. We have a treat for you today. I’ve got Suzy Mighell with me, and you’re going to find out what an incredible woman she is, because the more I get to know her, the more joy it is. She is the mother of Empty Nest Blessed.

Suzy: You said I was the mother of Empty Nest.

Audrey: The author. Yes. The author of—

Suzy: I feel like I am its mother. I did birth it.

Audrey: Yeah. The author of 60 Days to Finally Enjoy the Empty Nest. So we’re going to get into that. We’re going to talk about her experiences training parents. We’re going to talk about how she found her call as the mission-driven woman that she is, and other great tidbits.

So if you’re new to the podcast, loop back and listen to some of those beginning podcasts so that you can better understand the frame of reference. Here we’re talking about the seven laws and how you can be a more mission-driven individual, so take advantage of that.

So grateful to have you and ready to dive in and talk to Suzy. So, Suzy, just give us a little bit of introduction—things that you would like us to know about you.

And we’re going to dive deeper, but just give us an introduction: where you’re at in life, and something a little bit about you and your family.

Suzy: Okay. Well, first of all, I am such a fan of yours, and now we’re firm, fast friends.

Audrey: Yes.

Suzy: And I’m so grateful. We are kindred spirits. We are so aligned, and I’m grateful. It’s such an encouragement to find the women that—there—that mission-driven mindset. And I even love that term: mission-driven.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And I’ve actually—I’ve plagiarized it. Is it copyrighted, Audrey?

Audrey: No. It probably should be.

Suzy: It should be, because I have—I actually used it on a TV show last week that I was on. I hadn’t met you yet, but I knew that I was coming on here, and really I was talking about helping women in the empty nest really be mission-driven and finding their purpose.

Audrey: That is awesome.

Suzy: All your time.

Audrey: That just shows you how aligned we are.

Suzy: So, that’s awesome.

Audrey: We are, we are so aligned. Yeah.

Suzy: Well, my name is Suzy Mighell, and I have been an empty nester for 10 years. I live in Dallas, Texas with my husband. We met at Baylor University and married not long after graduation. We’ve been married 38 years, and we have three grown children, two daughters-in-law—which, by the way, I’m a writer. I used to say “daughter-in-laws,” but it’s actually “daughters-in-law.”

Audrey: Daughters-in-law, yep.

Suzy: Trivia. And I have two precious grandbabies under three—a boy and a girl. And I have two crazy grand-dogs all in the same family with the two children, so they need a lot of help when we’re available.

And then my youngest is a daughter. She is single and precious. And so, yes—so that is us. Bob and I have been married, as I said, 38 years.

I have always been involved in discipling women, teaching women, speaking, sharing my story, encouraging. I thank God I knew early on that even before the love languages were, like, a thing, God had given me the gift of encouragement.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: I do think the biblical term “exhortation” is deeper and richer than just encouragement. I think it encompasses inspiration. I hope it encompasses persuasion—exhortation, encouragement—all those things. So I really see myself more as an exhorter than an encourager.

Suzy: When I became an empty nester 10 years ago—took my last child to college—I knew before that time I had been serving on nonprofit boards. I was, you know, the PTA president. I was speaking and doing some training on parenting and things like that—character-driven parenting as my kids were growing up—teaching on that and traveling some, doing that.

And I knew I wanted to do something of significance in the empty nest. I wasn’t sure what it was. And gradually the Lord just steered me in the right direction. And I can say that the most important thing I did was listen and obey.

Audrey: That’s—

Suzy: So that involved, on my part, Him prompting me somewhere and me saying, “Okay,” and pursuing it.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: You know, we live in a time where it’s so easy to get information, and so many people are willing to share. And I found myself in a situation of doing what I called informational interviews.

So I was like, “Well, you know what? I’ve always kind of liked fashion, so maybe I should sell cabi clothing. They seem like a great company.” So I went and talked to some girls who were doing it and followed them around, and I was like, “Uh, I don’t know. I mean, I think it’s great. I love fashion. I’m not sure it feels significant enough on its own. I think that’s really what the Lord’s calling me to.”

So, different things.

Suzy: And I knew 10 years ago was the advent of blogging—when people were starting to blog. It was not the influencers. It was not the content creators. People were just blogging. They were getting these websites, they were writing down their feelings, writing down their thoughts, and sharing it with the world. And people were reading blogs.

Much like with podcasts today, people were like, “Oh, do you follow this blogger? Do you need to read this blog?”

And so I thought—because in college I was a marketing and PR major. Journalism.

Audrey: Oh, wow.

Suzy: Triple major.

Audrey: Triple major.

Suzy: So I was like, “Why? I mean, I’m always going to write, and I feel like I have something to share.” So I was thinking about that—thinking like, “Yeah, things for me.” But I know—what do I have to talk about?

So at the time I noticed, as many of my friends were dropping off those last children in college, that many of them were feeling lost. I think all of us—me included—felt that sense of grief that accompanies that huge transition, but also a sense of loss, a longing for purpose.

Audrey: Yeah. I would think you would call that just a longing for mission.

Suzy: Yeah. And a need to see, “What does God have for me? How can God use me?”

Suzy: And so I started looking, praying—as I said, informational interviews. If I’d known you then, I would’ve been like, “Oh, we’re going to have a series of informational interviews, Audrey.”

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: Anyway—so really just talking to people and following the Lord’s leading.

And I had this idea to start a blog for empty nesters that had an encouraging, joyful take on it. And I thought, “You know what? All it’s really going to take for me is the willingness—and really the courage—to put myself out there.”

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: As I looked at what empty nester blogs were out there, many of them were sad. They were like, “I was curled up on his bed in the fetal position crying,” and I thought, “Okay. Okay. This is not what the Lord wants for you.”

I’m married to a very financial husband. He is very financial. He is a CFO. He’s a CPA. He thinks very bottom line.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And so he was like, “You know, we’ve got a third of our life left.” That’s basically the bottom line.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: I was like, “Okay. That’s a good way to put it. We have a third of our life left. How does the Lord want to use us, and what is the purpose?”

And so I just felt like, “I’m going to go on this journey and discover God’s purpose for me, and see if I can just take women along with me.”

Suzy: So I started this blog and started doing things like—I would write a blog post about cooking for two rather than cooking for five, and here’s how you use a little two-quart crockpot instead of like the eight-quart one you used for your big family, and here’s how you modify your recipes.

And then I would make these videos and put them on YouTube or Facebook, and people would be like, “Oh, that’s great. Did you get that recipe out of a certain cookbook?” Or, “Hey, by the way, tell me about your earrings.” And I thought, “What’s going on?” At first I was like, “This is not the point of what we’re talking about.”

But then I thought, “You know what? People want to feel resourced. They just want to be resourced.”

And I realized that so many new empty nesters—because we really gave ourselves into that sacred calling that is motherhood—

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: —that is precious, and that calling from the Lord to raise up this next generation, to raise them well—feel like moms set themselves aside during that period.

And many, many moms then get to the empty nest stage and they are behind. They maybe don’t know how to do tech. They maybe have neglected their health and wellness. Often this coincides with perimenopause and menopause.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: So there are issues there. Maybe they have fallen out of the habit of exercising as they were busy with kids. Sometimes marriages suffer as there’s an over-focus on the children. Maybe their relationships—

So many of us at that 50-ish age are in the middle of that sandwich generation. We may have elderly parents that need attention—

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: —on down to those younger generations.

Sometimes we don’t know how to dress our body at 50. “I still want to look fashionable, but I don’t know how to dress this 50-year-old body,” or how to translate the trends to be what I would consider age-appropriate. You know, all those things. “I’ve got wrinkles on my face.”

So I just decided there was room to speak into just the empty nest woman, because that’s what I was. So it’s just made it really easy to be authentic. I just needed courage to say, “Okay, y’all, I’m having these wrinkles right here—now you see them—here’s what we’re going to do about that.”

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And share what I was using or what I was doing—whether it was fashion or beauty. So I decided to really focus Empty Nest Blessed on the whole woman, because women are so beautifully multifaceted. We love our families, but we love a good bubble bath. We love beauty products, we love cute clothes, and we love our husbands. And so I thought, “I’m going to talk about all those things.”

Suzy: So that is how I ended up with Empty Nest Blessed. My mission statement with Empty Nest Blessed, right from the beginning, has not changed, and it was to encourage, inspire, and bless empty nesters.

And to me, that blessing encompasses serving them. So if I can help you find a Target sweater that makes you feel cute, I am thrilled. Because I feel like I’ve served you—because you don’t like to shop, or you don’t get out there, and you’ve never seen this Target sweater until I put it on.

This is, by the way, from Target—little puff sleeve, short sleeve sweater.

Audrey: Cute.

Suzy: Thank you. So that is the approach that I took. And I just started writing, and women responded, and it’s been 10 years, and I’m still going.

Audrey: That’s so great.

Suzy: And during that time, you know, I’ve expanded as my life’s expanded—as my boys both got married, as I became a grandmother. My topics have expanded.

Suzy: And I think it’s so funny, Audrey. I’d love to know what you think about this, because I feel like when we’re younger, don’t you feel like we talked about the empty nest like it was a destination? Like you and I are going on a plane and we’re going to Paris, and then we are in Paris.

No, this is more like an around-the-world cruise. You more like got on a boat and then it took off, and you’re just in all kinds of different—it’s not a destination. It is a dynamic journey that you just embark on.

Audrey: Yeah. Do you feel that?

Suzy: Yeah.

Audrey: Yeah. And you know, for me—I mean, we’re not quite there. We’re pretty close. But I just didn’t think about it enough.

And we’ll get into Suzy’s book here in a minute, but one of the things I said to her when we were talking yesterday—just about things—she mentioned, “Well, I really feel like women need the book who might be struggling in empty nesting or maybe they’re just entering it.” And I said, “No, I think they need it 10 years before.”

It would’ve helped me to have interacted with some of these ideas earlier—to have put more thought into this stage of my life, because I just thought about the go-to-college, get-married, have-the-kids part. I didn’t really think a lot about the parenting-of-adult-kids thing, and frankly, I thought it would be a lot smoother.

And that’s not—you know, I have great kids. That’s mostly my problem, not theirs. But just thinking about each phase of life—thinking about what the future might bring and what you might want in that phase—is so helpful.

And we’re thinking more about it now. I mean, we’re doing a better job now, but it’s going to happen. It’s imminent. It’s in your future.

And so the more you can think about what that will look like—and for many women it means many years that their husband is still working full time.

And sometimes these women work. Sometimes they find work that’s meaningful for them, and that’s wonderful if they do. But I know plenty of women whose husbands have retired young, or they’re in their fifties, they’re empty nesters, neither of them is working, and they’ve said to me that they aren’t sure how to use their days.

They’re becoming really kind of overbearing grandparents—some of them—because they don’t know how else to use their time. And I’m always like, “There are so many ways God could use you.”

So I do really agree with you that it’s—and you’ve walked it—but I think because of your attention to it—

Your intention to understand it—and then all the interactions with however many hundreds of thousands of women that you’ve had and their feedback—has made you such an expert in this area, and able to reflect back. Because this is what I’ll say: as I was reading your book, it was like almost every page I felt like, “Oh yeah, that’s totally me,” or “I have exactly felt that way,” or “I have had that exact problem.”

So you really have hit on what some of those key pain points are and given some beautiful solutions. And another thing I really love about the book is that you give journal prompts—I think for every day, or most days. And so you’re providing your insights and you’re providing some answers, but you’re also encouraging us to be really self-reflective, which is so therapeutic and helpful, and helps us come to our own conclusions around that thing.

And some of them, it’s addressing pain points, but mostly it’s being optimistic—looking at the future, focusing on the good—which I think is so vital.

So I want to go back, if you don’t mind, to when you were a little bit younger. What caused you to study the things that you studied in college? And what did life look like for you as a younger mother?

Simply because we have moms of all ages listening, and I would like them to get a little bit clearer picture of what led you to that moment—and you said it was on your birthday—of dropping your last child off at school and hitting that wall. Wow.

So what, in your growing up years or your college years, gave you some insights on who you are? How did your own self-discovery journey—what did that look like for you in figuring out, “Oh, this is what I’m interested in,” “I’d like to know more about that”—that self-knowledge that aided you in your life?

Suzy: I think that’s a great question. And I think one of the things, as you were just talking, that I love—and that I think we’re so aligned in—is the idea of intentionality. Being very intentional.

The people that I see just willy-nilly wandering through life and just kind of going with their gut and reacting with their gut and not pausing to listen to the Holy Spirit—just not being intentional, not being thoughtful about responding.

And listen, I’m an impulsive talker as much as the next person, but I think that desire to live with intentionality—

So honestly, Audrey, I can remember from an early age, when I really came to know the Lord, just having an overwhelming desire to want to glorify Him, and yet not knowing what that was going to look like.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And so I remember just thinking this very—like—all I have to really offer is this thing.

Audrey: Yep.

Suzy: And all I have to offer is me.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: But I had a strong sense of what, of course, is throughout scripture: He equips whom He calls.

Audrey: Yes. Yep.

Suzy: And I don’t just mean that like, “You’re going to have a podcast, so you got a microphone.” I don’t mean equipped that way. I really felt like He gifted me the way He gifted me. He put the desires in my heart.

Audrey: Yes.

Suzy: If we’re truly given over and surrendered to the Lord, and our heart’s desire is to honor and please Him in all we say and do and think, two things are guaranteed.

Number one: we will fall short. We will live for ourselves. We will sin. We will gossip when we shouldn’t. We will make mistakes. We must repent and turn from that sin and do our best.

The second thing that’s guaranteed is that He will be faithful.

Audrey: Mm-hmm.

Suzy: If you desire to please Him, He will equip you to please Him.

Audrey: Yes. Yeah.

Suzy: So I think my own natural abilities and instincts—my upbringing. My family moved about every two years when I was growing up. So I was always in a new environment, always meeting new people. So I got good at just being warm, being friendly, being—

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: —I can talk to anybody, and I’m not intimidated. I’m not shy, because you couldn’t be. You won’t survive.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And so I think I saw the way the Lord brought my life circumstances to shape me, as well as my spiritual gifts—exhortation, discernment.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And my desire to encourage others, to build them up, to help them see what I could see when I looked at them—which is, “You just have so much to offer. Please share your gifts with others.”

Audrey: Yes—please.

Suzy: And I think I could see things—or that maybe it’s just the spiritual gift of discernment—but I could see that in them even if they couldn’t. So that combined with this desire to exhort.

The five love languages—my primary one is, guess what: words of encouragement.

So it’s just about who He made me, who He called me to be. And what I added was just the desire to honor and serve, to live in His will, and do what He wanted.

So I think being open, and then listening to His voice and being obedient—and when He put an opportunity before me, not saying yes to everything, but thinking very carefully before I would say no.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: Making sure it wasn’t a no because I was afraid.

Audrey: Yes.

Suzy: If it was a no because it was a little outside my comfort zone, or I’d never done it before, or it sounded a little scary and big—that’s not a reason to say no.

Suzy: So really, as I’ve done Empty Nest Blessed and as I’ve seen the Lord work in my life, I saw that He would bring me time after time into situations where I would learn, and He was setting me up for the future.

He literally—hear me on this—He does not waste a thing. Not a—

Not a miscarriage that I had. Not a sin that I committed that I regret.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: Not a conversation. Not a night of sleep where He woke me up—and it says in the Word He speaks to us in the night—and that He’s speaking to me, and I’m listening.

He doesn’t waste a thing.

And if you truly live with that mindset, you will listen and you’ll pay attention. And you will see Him. If it’s your desire and you pour out and ask Him, you will see Him everywhere, and you will see Him preparing you.

And so when an opportunity comes and you think, “I don’t know,” but then you just can fall back and go, “He’s equipped me. He’s prepared me for just such a time as this. He said, ‘This is the way—walk in it,’ and my job is to walk.”

And it’s such the sweetest way to live. I cannot tell you. It brings peace. It brings joy. It brings a sense of purpose and mission.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And it’s not perfect. My life is not perfect. I make mistakes. I misspeak. I sin. But I am sold out to my Savior—honoring Him with my life’s calling and my life’s work—and committed to serving others.

I think if I had one message that I want your precious audience to hear, it’s that if you desire for Him to use you, He will do it.

Audrey: Yes.

Suzy: If you desire—oh yes—and He’ll do it.

Audrey: Yes.

Suzy: He will do it. And your job is to take courage, be obedient, see what He’s done.

Suzy: And, you know, in a really practical sense too—let’s get practical—because one of the things I talk about in my book is moms come to the empty nest and they go, “I don’t know who I am anymore. Like, I studied these things in college a long time ago.”

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: I mean, you know, I told you my major was PR, journalism, and marketing. So I was in journalism—let me tell you, there was no internet, girl.

Audrey: There was no internet there.

Suzy: We were typing.

Audrey: Yeah. I tell my kids all the time, we went to the typing lab.

Suzy: That’s what we did.

Audrey: We did.

Suzy: We wrote papers.

Audrey: We did.

Suzy: And we were just grateful that we had automatic typewriters.

Audrey: Oh, yes.

Suzy: And they weren’t—

Audrey: Yep.

Suzy: Isn’t that funny?

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And just so grateful.

So anyway, I think it’s very, very important. I open my book this way because I think no matter where you are in life, the most important thing is to figure out who you are—and most importantly, who God says you are.

So I open the book with a chapter that tells you to do something kind of weird, and that is: text 10 people and ask them to describe you in three words.

Audrey: Oh, I love this exercise.

Suzy: And I did. I texted my kids. I texted my parents. I texted—And I shared this story about how I thought they were going to be, like, real bossy. And especially my mom was going to be like, “You’re wealthy,” you know, “bossy, opinionated, strong,” you know—whatever. I was expecting to hear all of these negative terms.

Audrey: Yeah. Yeah.

Suzy: And I already had tried to do this—as I went through the exercise. The first part of that exercise is really: write down what you think you are—like how you hope that you are, and what you are, and what you think your gifts and abilities are, skills, all those things.

So then when I get these words back, I hear words like “encouraging,” “motivating,” “persuasive,” “inspiring,” “confident leader”—all these things.

It was shocking. It just reframed everything for me. And I thought, “Lord, if this is what people think they see—I mean, I know I’m a hot mess or whatever—but if they think they see this, this is like a little bit of me and all You. So I can walk in that.”

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And He says, “This is the way—walk in it.” I can walk in that way. I can be that woman that people think I am because of my faith.

Suzy: And then we go on in the book to talk about the importance of what God says about who you are, and I have a list of 50 things right from His Word.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: That He says you are beloved, and accepted, and—peaceful—and He rejoices over you, and you’re a daughter of the King—all these things.

So it’s a sweet, sweet list that you can camp on as your daily devotional for hopefully weeks and months.

Audrey: Mm-hmm.

Suzy: I hope so.

Audrey: Mm-hmm.

Suzy: I hope it’s encouraging.

Suzy: But I think too—I don’t know if you’ve gotten to the part in the book—but we take those words—things that you feel like you were, the gifts that you had before maybe you even had kids.

Audrey: Mm-hmm.

Suzy: Because you were a woman before you were a mama.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: So you take who you were as a woman before—what you were good at—and you think that through, work through that journal, through that—however you need to do it.

Then you take these words you got from others. You take what God says about who you are in Him. And then you start thinking about, okay, how long was I parenting?

You know, if you have one child, you’re talking 18 years—you were actively parenting. If you have multiple children—like we do, you and I—it’s maybe 25-plus years that you are actively parenting.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: So literally write down: what skills and abilities did you add or enhance during that time that you were fulfilling that very, very important role of a mother?

You probably became a better counselor. You definitely became a better driver. You probably became a better cook. All the things. If you were a flower arranger, you probably became more organized—what did you add?

So it really is like a formula: who I was before I had kids, what I learned during that time, equals who I am now. And if you can identify that, you are well on your way to figuring out your purpose and your mission.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And add to that all the beautiful things that you share with The Mission-Driven Mom about the seven laws and natural law and really understanding the great works—and you’ve got a woman that can contend.

Audrey: Yeah. And one of the things that kind of makes me sad when I talk to some of these women who are in that empty nest phase and feel lost is I just always think, boy, the world needs you so much more than you know.

And what I find—and maybe you find this too—is so many people selling themselves short. And frankly, I know that this false humility thing—where we conflate beating ourselves up with somehow being humble—those are definitely not the same things at all.

But also, alongside what you were saying, Suzy, I think sometimes we’re selling ourselves short, and actually the real problem is just a lack of faith—because we don’t trust the God who made us, and we don’t trust that He can use us.

And that He understood that equation from the beginning.

And so, in a very practical sense, echoing what you said: if someone comes up to you and says, “Is there something I can do to help you?” and they stick around long enough and let their will be known, you’re going to find a way to use their help.

This is exactly what God does with us.

This is why the first principle in my book—the first thing we talk about in the Academy—is just the concept of being willing, being submissive. Submission comes before mission. And it’s just recognizing that as clumsy and as awkward as you feel, you still are useful. You are irreplaceable in the space that you live in, and there is so much room for you to grow into more.

Audrey: One of the stories that I love to tell: I went to a Fourth of July celebration in a park where they had little setups from colonial times, and one man was there busy with a potter’s wheel and showing kids how he threw pottery. Then he had a bunch of his work displayed, and you could purchase it.

And it was beautiful. He did gorgeous work, and he was clearly in his retirement years. And so I said—well, I just assumed—“How long have you been doing this? You must have been doing this for a really long time.”

He said, “Oh, just three or four years.”

So what happened? He said, “Well, I always was curious about pottery. I thought it would be fun to take a class. And so I finally just went ahead and did it. Turns out I’m really good at it.”

And he never would’ve known.

And here he was—60, 65-plus—when he discovered this incredible gift that he has. And now he travels around and shares this with children. It’s an income source. It’s a source of joy and relaxation for him. It’s a way to teach and give back and serve.

It’s all these beautiful things—mission-driven things—wrapped up in one. And that self-discovery never has to end.

And so I’m sure in your work—and I can ask you this question—what are you still discovering about yourself and about what God can do with you even in these empty nesting years?

Because it looks to me very much like you’re still facing fears, you’re still engaged in personal growth, and you’re still showing up every day, letting God use you.

So what’s that giving to you personally? We know that your work is blessing other people, but what’s it doing for you—how you see yourself and your relationship with God—and those kinds of things?

Suzy: That’s a great question. Thank you for asking that.

I think more than anything, I am struck by the fact that God—who created the universe, who made mountains out of nothing, put the stars in the sky and the sun and the moon, and created my hand—He does not need my help.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: But He truly—this is truly how I feel—He literally lowered Himself to want me to help Him.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: It is such a supreme act of love.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And yesterday you and I got on the topic of talking about the sovereignty of God, and I think either you truly believe He’s totally sovereign, or you’re doing some sort of weird form of idolatry where you’re making God into the image of man and you’re putting limitations on Him.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And He’s totally sovereign. You can’t comprehend the sovereignty of God, truly. And it’s called a great mystery in scripture.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And so I think to answer your question: the older I get, the more grateful I become that He is choosing to use me. He does not need me.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: He can raise up out of stones.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: He can raise up another person to do my job.

Audrey: Yeah. Yeah.

Suzy: But He loves me so much that He wants to use me and partner with me. He is about my growth—my conforming into the image of Christ—my becoming more like His Son. That’s what He is about.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: The mission He can do—

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: So—nothing. I am just—yes—nothing. I am just so, so grateful. And so I love what you’re saying about partnering with Him. I actually think that He’s like, “Okay, I will use you.”

Audrey: Yes.

Suzy: It’s almost like He said, “I choose you.”

Audrey: A hundred—okay. A hundred percent.

Suzy: Exactly. Yes. And He does not—I mean, this is not a partnership. This is like me going, “Really? Oh, wow. You’re—okay.” Well, yes, of course, but I know exactly what you mean. You’re not alone in it.

You can’t even begin to understand the load and the weight that He’ll carry, and the resources that He’ll provide that will show up.

And like you, the most heartbreaking thing I see—and you and I are so aligned in this—is women who do not feel that they have something to offer.

Audrey: Yes.

Suzy: As we are called to love others as we love ourselves, and consider others more important than ourselves, and to serve others through love—anyone can do that.

Audrey: Yep.

Suzy: If you come to the Lord palms up and say, “Do this. Show me how,” how things will fall into place. If that is truly the desire of your heart, He will give you—sorry, I keep hitting my microphone—He will give you the desires of your heart. He says that in scripture, and He will provide the way, provide the path.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: If you don’t feel equipped and ready, take Audrey’s course. Go through my book. Go through Audrey’s book. Be open, do the work, and see how the Lord has been preparing you and equipping you all your life. You didn’t see it, but you’ll start—the light bulb will go on. You’ll go, “This is it.”

Audrey: Yeah. This is it. Yeah.

Suzy: So how am I continuing to grow? Learning new things all the time. I’m curious. I’m learning new things. He puts challenges in front of me.

It’s like when you have a fingernail and you take your nail file and—you know, you don’t file the top where it’s already smooth. You file the edges where there’s like a pointy thing.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And so I feel like that’s what the Lord is always doing in my life. He’s like, “You’ve got a little pointy thing here, and it’s kind of a problem, and so we’re going to file on that for a little while.”

It’s funny too, because I’ve realized with writing this book—so I just turned 60 this year, and 60 feels super old.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: Like the number. When I was young, I always thought, “60. Now that’s old.” Like, that’s grandma age. Well, I am a grandma. But I didn’t think 60 was like this.

And I’m very aware and trying to be very thoughtful of the example I’m setting for my children and other young people I meet when I get to speak at colleges or whatever. I just want to set this example of this is what the last—according to my husband—third of your life looks like. Where you are making a difference.

And really the number one thing to make a difference is just be surrendered to God and trust Him to bring you the thing.

Audrey: Mm-hmm.

Suzy: And remember—when I was younger—did you do this? I remember being afraid that if I really surrendered and submitted, He was going to send me to Africa.

Audrey: Oh yeah.

Suzy: Scary, in solitary confinement, like Corrie ten Boom or something.

Audrey: Yes, yes.

Suzy: And it was going to be terrible. The Lord knew that this delicate flower could not handle that. It was not going to be my calling. There’s no mascara in Africa.

Anyway, I just—I was like, “No, I cannot.” And sure enough, the Lord equips whom He calls and He loves us enough to prepare us and prepare the way for us. And that’s what He did with me.

Audrey: Yeah. It’s funny—the hang-ups we have.

There’s a woman actually that came through my Academy, and the women that come through, they go on to do incredible things. This particular woman has bought some land in Mexico and she’s trying to establish an orphanage for Mexican orphan children—like a boarding school for them. And it’s really amazing.

And I remember a couple years ago having a conversation with her about her work, and getting off the phone and being like, “What am I doing?” Like, I just feel like I’ve got such a cushy life.

And I mean, we’ve gone down there and served an orphanage—I try to give back in those ways too—but I really had to do some soul-searching and make sure that I knew, “This is where I needed to be.”

And finally, I just—Lord and I talked it out again—and He was very clear: “You are to be the one that stays where you are and inspires the women where they are.”

And so it doesn’t seem hard enough or enough of a sacrifice. And then you have people on the other end, you know?

So it—we all have our hang-ups.

Suzy: Yeah. And I think there’s a little graphic that’s in my book—I don’t know if you’ve gotten to it yet—where I talk about toggling. You know how your iPhone, all of a sudden, is messed up, and you’re like, “What is happening?” And you investigate, and then you find one little switch was toggled the wrong way.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: This happened—I’m toggling things.

So anyway, I talk about: toggle on kindness. Toggle on compassion. Toggle off comparison.

God is working on you individually—remember, Creator of the mountain, sun, moon, all of that—so working in the lives of individuals. When you think of how many individuals there are, working in the lives individually of that many people, that’s nothing.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: That’s nothing.

Audrey: Yeah, yeah.

Suzy: Truly, totally sovereign. He can do that. So He is at work, and there is no comparison. Do not compare. But we tend to do that.

And I think we are in a situation and environment with social media where that is very common.

Suzy: And I notice that the things that I talk about, I can talk about, and people have opinions about. And sometimes they push back or tell me that’s awful, or they don’t agree, or they think it’s fabulous—whatever they think.

And then there are others—if it’s an area of life where I stay silent, they tend to fill in the blanks. And that’s the thing you learn in PR: beware of silence. Because when you’re not controlling the message—when you’re allowing silence—you’re giving permission to other people to fill it in.

And so there are things I’m just not going to talk about on social media. I’m pretty honest about a lot of things, but I don’t show my grandbabies’ faces because the parents have asked me not to. And I don’t talk about their names or who they are. We just don’t talk a lot about that.

Same with my parents. My parents have asked me not to talk about them or where they live or anything like that. So I honor that.

And so there are things I’m not going to talk about. But even things in my own life—people make assumptions based on what you don’t say.

And what I’ve noticed is usually they assume you are up here and they’re down here.

Audrey: Yep. Just because you’re sitting in front of a mic.

Suzy: Oh yeah. Or they think, “Surely I have it all together,” and they are a hot mess.

And I’m like, “Oh no. It’s probably the opposite. Opposite. But thanks.”

Audrey: Yeah. Honestly, as soon as I start—when I have really big challenges—the first thing that the adversary wants to say to me is, “Who are you to be The Mission-Driven Mom? Who are you to hold yourself up like you’ve got it together?”

And I shrink from the call. That’s the way he gets me, right? That I shrink from the call, like, “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t have any right to be doing this.”

And I’ve never claimed to have it all together. It’s not like I claim that. Definitely we are still struggling along. I have to live the principles I teach every day, and when I do, they help me. And when I don’t, then I struggle.

I totally, a hundred percent agree. It’s just—all that you and I are doing is trying to proclaim the message we feel in our hearts. That’s really what this is fundamentally about.

And I talk about that in the book. All these people that I studied—it’s fascinating—because they always end up talking about a message they feel they’re called to convey from God. They’re messengers.

And messengers don’t have to have it all figured out. And they don’t have to have all the answers, but you’re accountable for the message that you feel called to. So I have to deliver it or I’m not going to be able to live with myself. I’m going to feel like I’ve fallen down on what I was meant to do.

Suzy: I love what you said about the adversary. And do you know the book that helped me so much identify the adversary in my life? It’s C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters.

Audrey: So good. So, so good.

Suzy: And that being said, in 2 Timothy, Paul does speak very frankly to Timothy, his son in the faith, and really explains to him that the three things that we really contend against as believers are the world, our flesh, and then it’s the adversary. It’s the devil.

Audrey: Yes. Yeah.

Suzy: Those are the three things.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: I find that very helpful to call it out. Like, what happened here? Was it the world? Was I tempted to fall into something I shouldn’t have? Was it my own flesh—most of the time that’s it—was it my own flesh? Or was it truly the adversary?

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: What was it? So anyway—Screwtape Letters. So good.

Audrey: Okay. Before we finish, I want to do two things. Because so much of this really spoke to me, I’m just going to read a couple of my favorite quotes.

Suzy: Oh, okay.

Audrey: And then I want to talk for a minute before we finish about the parenting sections and your journey in teaching parents before this all came about, and your journey in parenting your own adult children. And maybe, as we finish up, some counsel for empty nesters—but maybe other moms too—about what it’s important to remember.

And then of course, I’m just going to say it again: just go get her book. Even if you’re not there—get the book. You don’t have to do all the journaling. You could, you couldn’t, but it’s going to help you think about some things that you should be thinking about now that I wish I would’ve been thinking about 10 years ago.

Okay. One favorite quote: “Remember, just like any other season of life, the blessings of the empty nest accompany the challenges.” And I know that’s born from all of the pain you’ve seen in so many of the women that you’ve worked with, that you’ve influenced, because there’s so much about it that seems so painful.

I mentioned to you—I don’t know if I mentioned this or not—but I was recently on a podcast and we started talking about our families. And before we got on, he mentioned to me what so many people say: that they have grown children, and those grown children aren’t doing some of the things they want them to do, and his wife is constantly beating herself up about it.

And that is such a common tale. And when my first child started telling me they were struggling with their faith, I turned it inward. I just beat myself up like mad and tried to think of all the reasons it was my fault and all the things I had done wrong—even though we read scripture and prayed daily and went to church every week.

It’s not like we didn’t do the things. It’s not like I wasn’t trying to set a good example. And their journey is their journey. But again, I really related.

And it’s so simple, but it’s so profound and important to remember that there are so many blessings that accompany those challenges, that heartache.

And frankly, maybe a lot of those blessings are the personal growth that you’re going to experience as you work through some of your things—because that’s what’s happened to me.

And then another favorite quote is in this great expectations section—because that resonated with me: “I’m just going to come right out and say it: unrealistic expectations will steal your joy.”

Suzy: Steal your joy.

Audrey: I talk so often about how comparison steals your joy. It’s like a quote we use in the Academy. We talk about that—stop comparing, you mentioned that—stop blaming, all those things.

But I really didn’t get it until the last few years how much I was setting up expectations without even realizing I was doing it—how I was laying those on other people in very unfair ways. And it was stealing the joy that we could have been having in our relationship.

My own personal—anyway. Nailed it. Totally nailed it. So those were a couple of my favorite quotes.

Suzy: Thank you. Yes—expectations and disappointment are huge. I’m actually really working on a blog post about that right now that’s going to come out in the next couple weeks on emptynestblessed.com, because I felt like I needed to write more about this.

We are expectant. And I love that hymn, “Come Thou Long-Expected Jesus.” And we are taught to be expectant. There’s so much prophecy in scripture—being expectant. I do think that is in our hearts. And the Lord baked that into our DNA, and we are to be expectant.

We look forward to heaven. We have expectations of what heaven will be like. It’s not going to be like what we think, but we still live in that hope of expectancy—of Christ’s return, or of our life in heaven, or whatever it is.

So I do think we’re hardwired to be expectant—

Audrey: And we’re future-oriented beings.

Suzy: We are. And that’s for a reason. And that’s a good thing—to have goals, to be intentional, to think about the future.

So expectations—when they are accompanied by disappointment—that’s when they can get you in trouble as a parent.

So I talk about: be very careful about not putting expectations on your children. Your job is to really say, “Lord, here they are. We did our best. You are right with us. We tried to be obedient sinners raising little sinners, and we give them to You, and You love them more than we do. You have a plan, and I trust You.”

And so it’s really an exercise in your own faith and trusting.

And really, if you’re going to have expectations—let me tell you—put them on yourself.

And I talk in the book about: I have two expectations for myself every time my kids come home.

One is that our home would be joyful and fun. That they would feel welcomed—loved, loved on, hugged—happy, excited to be home. I’m not going to compete with the in-laws for who gets you at holidays. I’m just going to make our house super fun so you want to come.

That’s one expectation I have for myself.

The second is: when my kids come, they will leave loved up. They will feel encouraged. They will feel happy. They will feel heard, listened to. I will not go in with my own agenda. I’m not going to go in with my own agenda. I’m going to be others-oriented. And I’m going to support them and be all about them—not shift the focus onto myself, but instead be in that support mode, being that joy booster in their life, not the joy buster that’s critical, or gives suggestions or advice that is not asked for.

Audrey: Yeah. It’s inappropriate.

Suzy: And let me tell you—you’ve got to be kind of hard on yourself when you become a parent of adult children, because you cannot—I cannot say this strongly enough, and I’m trying to be cute and fun about everything—but hear me now on this:

You cannot continue parenting your children the way you always parented them.

You are not to give advice without being asked. Do not give a suggestion, because that’s just another form of advice. Because they hear that as: you are incapable. You do not have the ability to handle this. I have to, and I don’t trust you.

Instead, it should be: “I feel like, with all you’ve gone through in your life, you have the ability to figure this out.”

And what you can bring to them as a parent—what their tribe, their friends don’t bring—is you raised them.

We were with our daughter a couple weeks ago and she was giving me this example: something happened with this friend and she tried to be a really great friend, but she wasn’t really reciprocating, and she wasn’t sure if she went too far.

And I said, “You know what? You have always been a good friend.” And I was like, “Back in second grade you…” And she was just like, “Really?” She didn’t remember that happened.

So you can tell these stories from their childhood and bring into the conversation: “Yeah, you were always like this. You were always fun-loving,” or “You were always so empathetic to others.” And yes—you are a good friend.

So in the book, at one point, I give 50 traits you can encourage in your adult kids.

And so I said to her, “You’re a good friend, and you are always a good friend. It is good to be a friend of Becca’s. It is good. And I hope I’m a friend of yours, honey, because you are such a good friend.”

And so that’s the second expectation. When they’re with you, they leave built up—feeling stronger, empowered, prayed for, loved on.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And so expectations—put them right here. Take them to the Lord and put them on yourself. Do not put them on your children.

He’s theirs—I mean, they’re His. And He is more than capable.

And if you keep taking them back, I would challenge you to work through that with the Lord, because it is a faith issue. It is a lack of trust in Him and His sovereignty and His love. And you need to work through that.

So that said, I’m not perfect. You’re not perfect. We all struggle with that. When we’re with our kids, we see things and we do tend to blame ourselves—whether it’s as simple as, “I didn’t teach them to be a very good cook,” or you see self-centeredness or impulsive speech or something that you’re like, “Darn it, we worked on that. How did this happen?”

And yet the Lord will work in their lives.

And I’m sitting here before you saying I’m 60, and you’re sitting where you are, Audrey—much younger than me—but we can both say the Lord is still at work refining us.

Audrey: Yes.

Suzy: And refining is hard work and it’s painful, and He uses fire, and it’s humbling—but He’s refining us. So He has that same plan for your children.

And you have to work—switching the way you parent. I’m telling you this strongly: you’re going to lose your children. You’ll lose them if you cannot change the way you parent and stop giving unsolicited advice.

And guess what? If you do that with your grandkids and start talking to them about the way they parent, you’re going to lose the grandkids too.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And this is serious. This is serious as a heart attack. You’ve got to work on this. And do the work.

Audrey: Yes. Amen. Amen and amen. Such good advice. So many great things. Ugh. I haven’t been able to finish it. I’m just going to keep going through it, doing the exercises—such beautiful advice.

So, Suzy—where can our moms find you? Where can they get the book? What are some of your offerings? I know there’s a blog, there are other socials. Just tell us all the ways that they can be blessed by your ministry—which it really is a ministry.

Suzy: Oh, thank you. I hope that it is. I hope all of life is our ministry, truly. And I think living with that mission-driven, ministry-driven mindset is so powerful. And He can use that. And I pray He does every day.

Audrey: Yeah.

Suzy: And I know He is using you, my friend.

You can find me—my home base is emptynestblessed.com. When you get there, do not expect that you’re going to have some sort of deep conversation that we just had. You will find that, but you’ll also find the fun fall fashion. You will find my favorite beauty devices. You will find my travel adventures. You’ll find 68 great date night ideas for empty nesters.

Audrey: Oh fun. I didn’t see that one.

Suzy: Wow. That was on my Instagram today—five fun fall date night ideas for empty nesters. And then I offered a freebie that you can get, which is 68 great date night ideas for empty nesters.

So you’ll see things that are for the total woman. And that does include parenting. It does include finding your purpose in the empty nest, but it also includes all these other things that we love so much—taking great care of our bodies, staying healthy and getting all your checkups and all those things.

So emptynestblessed.com. You can sign up for my newsletter there. I do a Friday fun newsletter. We do have a lot of fun on Empty Nest Blessed. I will mostly tell stories about myself doing dumb stuff—stuff like we closed on our house last Monday. This is the house we built in 2004. We raised our kids in.

I’m embarrassed to say that I was in there with my very manly husband or two very manly real estate agents, and I cried through the entire thing.

Audrey: Aw.

Suzy: Did not plan to. Didn’t think I was going to bawl through the entire thing. I mean like messy cry, not pretty. So I told that story in my newsletter this week. So I’m always telling crazy stories about myself that hopefully people feel better about how they are.

Anyway, so sign up for my newsletter. I’m on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube: @EmptyNestBlessed.

Audrey: Perfect.

Suzy: Embarrassingly easy to find—@EmptyNestBlessed. Emptynestblessed.com.

The book is emptynestblessed.com/book, or it’s on Amazon—audiobook read by me, or ebook, or hardback.

Audrey: Nice.

Suzy: Makes a great gift. But as you said, it’s new empty nesters all the way to longtime empty nest.

Audrey: And honestly, it’s going to be a Christmas gift to several people I know.

Suzy: Oh, thank you.

Audrey: And in this case—I mean, I’m sure the audiobook is wonderful, but the hard copy’s great, because there’s journaling pages all the way through. I mean, I’m a hardback kind of a girl anyway.

Suzy: I get it. Yeah. The audiobook does come with a workbook, so you will get that as well.

Audrey: Oh, nice.

Suzy: Well, and so that’s a helpful thing, I hope.

Audrey: Yeah. Yeah. That’s awesome.

Audrey: Suzy, it’s been a joy. I am so grateful that you came today and spent the time to talk to us and share your wisdom. There’s so much more we can learn. Go follow her blog and get her newsletter so you can participate in all of the wisdom that she has to share.

So grateful for you and for your work. Thank you so much for being with us today.

Suzy: More to come with you, my friend. We will do some fun stuff—we’ve already talked about—on emptynestblessed.com.

Audrey: Yeah, that’ll be great.

Suzy: See you there. And praising the Lord for a sweet friendship with you.

Audrey: Yeah. Yeah. Grateful.

Suzy: Yeah.

Audrey: I feel the exact same way. Thank you.

Have you ever felt like you’re “just a mom”… even though you’re doing one of the most important jobs in the world?

In this episode of The Mission-Driven Mom Podcast, Audrey Rindlisbacher speaks to the quiet identity loss so many mothers experience and why modern motherhood often leaves women feeling unseen, depleted, and unsure of who they are becoming.

This episode explores:

• why so many moms feel invisible and exhausted

• how culture and education failed to prepare women for motherhood

• what it really means to move beyond “just a mom”

• the six traits of a mission-driven mother

• how to reclaim purpose, confidence, and identity without leaving motherhood

If you love your children but know there must be more than burnout and self-sacrifice, this conversation is for you.

Listen now and begin the journey from “just a mom” to a mission-driven mother.

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We want you to be a Mother of Creation ALL YEAR LONG! 

So we're offering something special we've never done before... "Sneak Peek" Workshop & Private Community!

From now until the September event, when you sign up you'll have access to this in-depth introduction to the Mothers of Creation content and you'll be mentored all year in a private community as you learn and practice some of the principles we'll cover at the event. 

Learn More Here

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AI GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission-Driven Life and founder of The Mission-Driven Mom.

Did you know that one in four moms feel they’ve lost their identity outside of motherhood and feel like they’re “just a mom”? This feeling increases the longer they are parents, and there’s a much larger majority—79 to 94 percent—who feel that their identity beyond motherhood is minimized or invisible.

Many mothers struggle with putting themselves last, with a third of the group deprioritizing self-care, leading to burnout where their identity feels reduced to “just mom.”

If you sometimes feel alone in this journey—if you feel like you are not affirmed by the world around you for the incredibly hard work that you do as a mom—if you don’t know how to fix this for yourself, how to move forward in a way that allows you to show up with optimism and energy for yourself and your family, and also feel like you’re making headway as a woman—if you worry that your own hopes and aspirations are getting lost in your motherhood—then this podcast is for you.

This is for you, Mission-Driven Mom, and especially this episode about going beyond “just a mom” to becoming a mission-driven mother.

Last week, we talked about why modern motherhood can make us feel empty. I shared three reasons why that’s the case, the problems it causes, and how it makes us feel. I also gave you some solutions for how to move forward.

Today, I want to tell you three things.

If you feel like you’re “just a mom,” if you feel like your identity as a woman is getting lost in the motherhood shuffle, if you are not making your needs known or acting on them, if you aren’t sure how to move forward—if you are like Valerie, who I quoted last week, one of our students who said she had a wonderful, beautiful family but wasn’t happy and didn’t know why—if those things resonate with you, then there are three really important things that you absolutely need to know.

Before I get into that, if you tuned in last week, you heard a short story about Leanna and how learning to be a creator—understanding drama and teaching that to her family—literally revolutionized her home. I’m not exaggerating.

She shared a beautiful story about how this work restructured her relationships, elevated her motherhood, and empowered her children and her entire family with a shared language.

Because of stories like that, we are reinstituting our MDM Celebration. We are bringing it back. This year’s theme is Mothers of Creation. It will take place in the fall, but we’re starting the conversation now, and we don’t want you to miss it.

I want you to be there on Thursday the 29th—coming up very soon—for a workshop. After that, you’ll be added to an exclusive community. This will be a sneak peek for the event.

From now on, anyone who signs up for the Celebration event will be able to attend this live sneak-peek workshop or view the recording, and then be part of this mentored, exclusive community all year long.

Throughout the year, we’ll do a drip experience on concepts and principles from the event. We’ll practice them. We’ll deep dive.

One of the reasons we decided to do this is because as I was reviewing all the content we’re going to cover in the fall, I realized there is so much. I kept thinking, “This is such an important concept—we could practice this for months—but I only have time to gloss over it.”

I can teach the concept, but then we have to move on.

If you’re part of this exclusive community—if you attend the workshop, learn the kickoff material, and then engage in the community all year—you will literally be becoming a Mother of Creation throughout the year. And it will culminate in our in-person event, which I believe is the last Saturday in September.

So go to themissiondrivenmom.com, head to the conference page, and sign up. The sooner, the better—because every day you wait is a day you’re not being mentored, supported, and lifted by this community of women, and a day you’re not becoming a Mother of Creation.

Here are a few things we’re going to cover in the workshop.

We’ll go over the origin of the Drama Triangle, which is actually fascinating. We’ll talk about what the Drama Triangle is and why it matters so much. We’ll help you understand the victim role in particular—how you show up as a victim in everyday life and what that looks like.

Then we’ll talk about the different types of victims. This is a key element that we will not have much time to explore in September, so I’m especially excited for you to get a jump start on this.

We’ll talk about the types of victims, why they matter, and which one you tend to show up as. We’ll discern how that becomes your way of being and give you the antidote—so you know how to get yourself out of victimhood.

Then Lindsey Wright—who we all know is one of the most incredible mentors in the world—will guide you all year inside the community. You’ll practice these concepts, read together, discuss them, and grow. It’s going to be incredible.

Think of it as a mini Academy experience—small, digestible pieces of information you can practice all year, with community support around you.

This experience will do three things for you.

It will jumpstart the content so you’re engaging with it all year long.

It will give you a deeper dive into the material we’ll cover at the event.

And it will provide mentoring and community support so you can become the creator you want to be.

Now, as we talk about what it means to go beyond being “just a mom” and step into becoming a mission-driven mother, I want to share a personal story—one I think many of you may relate to.

Hopefully you haven’t experienced it the way I did, but I believe you’ll understand the feelings behind it.

To the mom who sees herself as “just a mom,” here are the three things you need to know.

As I’ve shared many times—because it’s part of my story, and it was a very painful part of my story—my husband struggled with a pornography addiction. It was particularly severe early in our marriage.

Two weeks after we were married, I had surgery, and the doctor told us to get pregnant right away.

My pregnancies were brutal. I was completely laid up. I lost a lot of weight. I was hospitalized with my second pregnancy. It improved somewhat with the last two, but overall, they were incredibly difficult.

On our first anniversary, I was eight months pregnant, and we continued having babies.

My husband went straight into real estate—a 100 percent commission-based career—so our income was very unstable as he learned the industry.

Meanwhile, I had surgery, got pregnant immediately, became very sick, quit school, and quit work. I had spent several years at a good university, but I never finished my degree. I didn’t have strong marketable skills, and I didn’t want to leave my babies anyway.

We already had one child, and I didn’t want them to grow up alone. It mattered deeply to me that my children be close and become friends. So we kept going.

Our children ended up being spaced about two to three years apart because the pregnancies were so hard.

At the same time, finances were difficult. Our marriage was difficult. Becoming a new mom was difficult. And both of our extended families were struggling.

My parents were separated and going through a very hard time. Blaine’s parents divorced during our early years of marriage.

It was layer upon layer of difficulty.

Eventually, I reached a breaking point. I felt depleted. I felt brain-dead. I felt overwhelmed.

I hit a wall and realized how unprepared I was—to manage my emotions, my thoughts, my time, my finances, extended family relationships, and the addiction we were dealing with in our marriage.

One day—honestly, I don’t even remember what triggered it—I think Blaine may have acted out or something had happened between us.

He came out one morning ready for work, we exchanged words, and I followed him into the garage. When he turned around and questioned me, I slapped him across the face.

That was the only time I’ve ever struck someone, and it was a huge wake-up call for both of us.

He was stunned. He just stood there staring at me. I couldn’t believe what I had done. He got in the car and left.

To his credit, he loved God deeply. He loved me. He loved our children. And he truly wanted things to be better.

When he arrived at the office, he got on his knees, begged God for guidance, opened the phone book, and called a therapist.

That therapy wasn’t particularly helpful. Many of the therapies, support groups, and books we tried weren’t helpful either. I searched relentlessly for answers, and nothing seemed to work.

Then I found this education.

That’s when everything began to change.

Within a few years of that moment—of slapping Blaine across the face in utter desperation—I was running a book club in my home with over fifty people attending every week.

Our marriage was in a much better place. We were in our own home. Our finances had improved.

We still had rough patches. We still had growth to do—and we still do—but within a few short years, that transformation occurred.

The book club led to building a homeschool organization, which eventually served over a hundred families.

I’m telling you this because you might look at me now and think, “Well, Audrey has a podcast, she built an academy, she mentors women—I could never do that.”

First of all, that might not even be your calling or where your gifts lie.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that the things we teach women are the same things that changed me. I know they work because they transformed my life.

Over time, those tools led to other projects, and eventually to founding The Mission-Driven Mom.

Today, we’ve helped over 600 women.

And what I want you to know—I’m going to tell you these three things because no matter how stuck you feel, and no matter how much you feel like “just a mom” right now, there are three things that are absolutely true that you need to know.

The first one that you need to know is a quote by Gilda Radner. She said, “Motherhood is the biggest gamble in the world. It is the glorious life force. It’s huge and scary. It’s an act of infinite optimism.”

I’m going to read it one more time: “Motherhood is the biggest gamble in the world. It is the glorious life force. It’s huge and scary. It’s an act of infinite optimism.”

If you listened to a podcast that I did recently for people who are thinking about not having children, you heard in that podcast a lot that I have to say about how courageous it is to be a mother. It is one of the most courageous things that you can ever do.

I want to read you some things that I wrote about you.

You took the risk of engaging in the messy business of raising children. Only you know how incredible and frightening this journey is. You give it your all. You are determined to see your children become individuals of faith and virtue and character and courage, and you are willing to sacrifice anything to build the best world possible for your children to inherit.

I know that that’s who you are, and I know that what you need and want is balance—because you want to be an excellent mother, and you want personal development. You want self-acceptance and courage. You want to be seen and matter and belong, but you also want to grow and thrive and succeed.

And all of these desires are the kinds of things that we open the door for at The Mission-Driven Mom. Even if you just listened to this podcast and read the book and got serious—and you can get the book for free at The Mission-Driven Mom—and got serious about living those 7 Laws of Life mission and got serious about being a truth seeker, you can become more than you are. You can find that balance.

A mission-driven mom is a movement of mothers who are working together to create a better world for our children and grandchildren by gaining the education which we never had, which ennobles us to lead ourselves and our families and our communities with truth. That is what we’re doing here.

We are linking arms and we are working together. We are gaining the right kind of education, which we never had. We are pushing back on the culture that tells us that what we do isn’t of value, and we are ennobled by these choices to lead ourselves, to lead our families, and to lead our communities.

When I started thinking about these concepts—and we have some rebranding coming for The Mission-Driven Mom, which I’m super excited about, and we’re going to talk more in detail about what that branding means—the word ennoble is part of that rebranding, and I want to talk to you about what being ennobled means.

To ennoble someone is to lead them to greater dignity or nobility of character. It means to elevate them—make them more honorable, dignified, or excellent. Often through a great deed or by imparting a higher moral quality. It signifies making someone better or more worthy of admiration, whether through suffering, talent, or virtuous actions—elevating their character or status.

That is what we do for each other at The Mission-Driven Mom.

We ennoble each other. The things that we read, the actions that we take, the accountability partners that we have, the workshops that we attend, the discussions that we engage in, the community service work, the read-alouds with our children, the things that we do in the community, in the MDM Academy, on this podcast, in our events—they are all structured to ennoble all of us, for all of us to be elevated in these beautiful, rich ways.

And if we are going to be ennobled to lead ourselves and our families and our communities with truth, it’s important to remember that truth is the quality of being in accord with reality. It’s what is actual, genuine, and honest—the opposite of falsehood and deception.

This is who you are.

So the first thing I want to tell you is: you are this kind of woman. I know that’s what’s in you. I know those are the things that you want and need. I know those are the things that you’re looking for. I know that you’re like us and you want to be ennobled, and you want that balance—but I also know that you already have a high moral quality because you’re here, because you’re listening, because you’re seeking, and because you want more.

And there’s that hope that things could be better. And that hope comes from knowing that there is truth, and that it can make us free. And as we are truth seekers, we can find the truth, and it will make us free.

So the second thing I want to tell you is the result of that—of knowing the quality of woman that you are and the desires that are in your heart.

You may feel just like a mom, but you can do all sorts of things that right now might feel impossible to do—but you really can.

And I’m going to list some of these things that I have seen women do, that I have done myself, and that I know that you can do.

You can learn to solve your significant problems. You can restore your closest relationships. You can gain deep self-knowledge and self-acceptance. You can love and like yourself. You can link arms with moms and make a difference. You can discern the truth in our confusing culture. You can be enlightened and lifted out of your problems and into your dreams and potential. You can become the example you want to be for your children. You can help us restore virtue to our communities. You can make unique and meaningful contributions. You can discover your unique gifts and use them to serve. You can belong and flourish in a community of noble women.

I know that you can. I have seen hundreds of women do this—women just like you and just like me.

In that moment where you’re slapping your husband across the face because you’re absolutely at your total and complete wits’ end—you have no idea how to move forward in your life. You have no idea where the answers are.

And I know there’s all kinds of garbage out there that’s telling you that it has the answers. And I know you’ve tried things, and some of them might have worked a little bit and some of them haven’t worked.

And if you’re feeling like “just a mom” and you’re feeling discouraged, I want to tell you that you are an incredible woman, and you can become more.

If you have the right tools and resources, you can become the kind of woman I know you want to be.

The third thing I want to tell you is that as you take actions to be a truth seeker, as you plug into the 7 Laws of Life mission, as you seek truth, as you grab classics, as you engage in self-knowledge and self-discovery—you will be moving toward the six traits of a mission-driven mother, and you can become a truly mission-driven mom.

What is a mission-driven mom? How do we go from “just a mom” to a mission-driven mom?

We understand that our dreams are the most noble part of us. That the things that we want are attainable. We latch onto that hope and we take steps in faith, and we take the actions to live the 7 Laws of Life mission that help us to become mission-driven mothers.

Here are the six traits of a mission-driven mom.

Number one, she is connected to God and draws her sense of value and worth from Him.

You are not taking the cue from your own terrible self-talk—because I’ve had all the terrible self-talk, and I know the way that we talk to ourselves, and it’s a bunch of lies.

You’re not going to draw your worth from your spouse, or from your friends, or from our culture, or from your children or their choices, or from your talents, or from the money that you earn, or from where you are in your career—none of that matters.

Your worth is being drawn from the infinite Being who created you, who knows and loves you, who accepts you completely and entirely, and loves you completely and entirely as you are in this moment—and who wants to walk with you on a journey of self-discovery, where you figure out how much more you can be, because you’re doing it for you and you’re doing it to be the example that your children need.

If you need to say that you’re doing it for your children, go ahead and say that. I’ve said it plenty of times—because they need a mom who’s on fire. They need a mom who knows who she is, who leads herself and her family, and who leads in her community using her gifts with confidence, who has like-minded friends with like-minded families, who links arms with them and goes out there and confidently shares truth.

So the second trait of a mission-driven mom is that she has confidence in herself and her choices because of the truths that she learns and lives.

You do not have to have all the answers all the time in order to be a great, confident leader—in order to make decisions that you feel good about.

You just need to understand what truth is. You need to know what principles are, and then know how to discover and lean into them, and you will be able to make decisions and move forward and lead yourself and others.

The third trait is that mission-driven moms are intentional with their time and energy, and they utilize them to love themselves and others.

We talk about this a lot in the Academy—that love is an action. It’s something that you choose to do, and the feelings of love follow the actions of love.

And so no matter how you feel about yourself or someone else in your life, you choose love—and you understand that everything that you do in the name of love, or that other people do in the name of love, is not loving.

So you pay the price to become acquainted with the true nature of love, and you love by living principles, and you’re intentional in using your time and energy to love.

Mother Teresa said, “Our mission is to convey God’s love,” and these truths are His truths. And so as we disseminate them and align our lives with them, we are actually following God and partnering with Him in our lives.

And then it enables us to love properly, instead of doing all kinds of unhealthy things or having unhealthy things done to us and not knowing what to do about them.

The fourth trait: a mission-driven mom knows her greatest gifts. She actively develops them, and she uses them in the service of others.

You can do this.

I was on so many podcasts the last few months, and often the host or hostess would say at the end, “Well, what do you want to leave with our audience?” And I almost always said the same kind of thing:

You are way more gifted than you think you are.

Because I was where you are. I had 15 years of formal education—and I said this last week—and I just didn’t have any idea what I was good at.

I knew I had some special interests. I loved studying art history, but I wasn’t an artist. I loved listening to great music, but I wasn’t a musician. And I wasn’t a great accountant, and I didn’t think I could be a great attorney—so what was there for me to be and do?

And there are so many things. That’s why there are so many self-discovery activities all throughout the MDM Academy—because it’s so important that you know yourself really well.

Mission-driven moms know what they’re good at. They’re developing their talents and using them to serve.

And can you imagine the rich example this sets for your children? Like, motherhood is awesome and womanhood is awesome and adulthood is awesome. And sometimes my parents fight and sometimes my mom cries, but she picks herself back up and then she’s stronger for the trial, and she figures out new ways to problem solve.

I know that’s what you want. That’s who you want to be. That’s what you want to give your family.

The fifth trait is feeling a strong sense of purpose and fulfillment every day as you work toward predetermined goals.

This is where, you know, being a mother—I don’t know, can anything outshine that sense of purpose that motherhood brings? Probably not.

But it doesn’t fill up every single space in our hearts and minds. We have a responsibility to do that for ourselves.

We have a responsibility to ourselves—to know ourselves and to find deeper meaning and purpose by setting and working toward goals, meaningful goals that enrich us and the people around us.

And the Academy also helps you do that. We talk a lot about not only finding and writing actionable principles, but we talk a lot about application of principles and tool sets for living them out—for what we call practicing principles.

And as you learn how to find principles and practice them, then your goals become very obvious, and you work toward living those principles more fully.

The sixth trait of a mission-driven mom is that she teaches her family what she’s learning as she grows and leads them on their mission-driven journey together.

She understands the importance—like Leanna from last week’s podcast, and like so many other testimonials we’ve received from our moms—that you bring your family on this journey.

That’s why we have read-alouds in Level One—so that you can pick a really awesome book off the shelf, and we know that it’s saturated with the principles that you’ve learned, and you can, through storytelling and bonding and snuggling and time together, pass those principles on to your children and create discussion points and all of that.

But in the end, a mission-driven mom continues to teach her family.

I remember being at an event a few years ago with one of our moms who was, I think, partway through Level Two or something. And at this event, it was fascinating—because one of her biggest takeaways was that she had not been teaching her family all of the things she had been learning.

And so her big plan—her way of having greater purpose and being more intentional with her time and energy and loving them more—was to go home and teach them more of what she’d learned.

That’s what mission-driven moms do.

So I want you to know three things: that you are courageous, incredible, and that those deep desires that you have to chase your potential while you level up as a mom are the best part of you. They’re noble, and I know that that’s what you desire.

The second thing I want you to know is that you can do that. It’s not just that that’s what you want. It’s not just that even though you feel like “just a mom” and you feel stuck, and you just hope that you could become that—you can.

I have watched women do all of those things. You can. And I want you to know that those six traits of a mission-driven mom are the goalpost for you.

That’s where we’re all headed, and we’re all doing those things—inculcating those traits into our character line upon line, bit by bit, day by day. That’s the aspiration that we’re all striving toward, and we become ennobled and we ennoble each other as we strive to become a more mission-driven mom.

And so as you set those six traits in front of you, and as you make a determination to become not “just a mom,” but a mission-driven mom, it will transform you.

So as we finish up here, I want to end with reinforcing again that yes, you can become a noble, virtuous, intentional wife and mother. Yes, you can be a great mother and woman. Yes, you can put yourself and your family first. Yes, you can discover and use your gifts to serve in your community.

And yes—you’re the only one that needs to change.

And what’s so great about that is that you’re the only one that you can change. And you have so much more power than you think you do. You can transform yourself and your family—and believe it or not, your community.

I hope that those words of encouragement sink down into your heart. Listen to this again and again if it helps you.

And remember that we believe in you. We know what an incredible woman you are, and we are here to help and support you in any and all of the ways that we possibly can to help you become more of that mission-driven mother that you want to be.

Make sure, if you’ve not already signed up, that you head over to themissiondrivenmom.com, go to the conference page, and sign up so that I can see you at the workshop on the 29th, and you can become part of that community and become more of a Mother of Creation—more of a creator in your own life—all throughout this whole year. It’s going to be a phenomenal journey, and I don’t want you to miss any of it.

Thank you so much for joining me here today.

I have great news. Next week, you can look forward to an interview with a woman named Suzy Mighell, who I was very honored to meet.

This one is especially for empty nesters, but I want every one of you to listen carefully, because I wish I would’ve known what she was teaching 10 years ago, and I wish I would’ve known how to prepare better for moving toward adult children and empty nesting—because I was not well prepared enough. And it has been a bumpy road for me.

And we’re going to smooth that road with this interview.

You can go grab her book as well: Empty Nest Blessed. You can check her out—her name is Suzy Mighell.

We will be talking next week all about how to prepare for that time period, what’s so beautiful and rich about it, and how you can continue to level up as a woman and as a mother all the rest of your life.

Looking forward to that discussion with her. I will see you then.

Modern motherhood can feel like a loop: endless meals, endless messes, endless decisions… and somehow, you end the day feeling more empty than when you started. If you’ve ever wondered, “Is this all?”

This episode will put language to what you’re carrying, and give you a real path forward.

In today’s podcast, I walk you through three specific reasons modern motherhood leaves moms empty and the solutions that actually work.

You’ll also hear personal stories (including my homeschooling journey and what it taught me about confidence, truth, and courage), plus practical, actionable steps you can take immediately, starting with what you read, what you surround yourself with, and how you begin the journey of self-discovery with your children beside you. 

Important invitation: If you’re coming to MDM Celebration in Utah on Saturday, September 26, your ticket now includes something powerful:

✨ a live sneak peek workshop on January 29

✨ and a mentored community that carries you all the way to the event

Grab your ticket and join us (and invite your sisters, friends, mom, grandma, nieces—everyone who needs shared language and real tools). Go to themissiondrivenmom.com and click Conference.

And tell me in the comments: Which of the three are you working on first: culture, education, or self-discovery?

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📚 Recommended Reads

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💛 Join us for the Mothers of Creation Conference, Sneak Peek Call, & Mentoring Community

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Transcript (AI Generated)

Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, the author of The Mission Driven Life, and the founder of The Mission Driven Mom. I am so excited for you to join me today. We are going to talk about a topic that’s a little bit heavy, one that weighs on our hearts as mothers: why modern motherhood leaves us empty.

And I have some really important things to talk to you about—three specific reasons why modern motherhood leaves us empty. I’ve also got some results of that emptiness and some solutions for you. And we’re going to get into that in just a minute. I want to tell you a couple of personal stories, tell you about some of our students’ experiences, and give you some tasks—some actionable steps you can take—when we’re done here.

But first, I have to tell you about this opportunity I don’t want you to miss. If you’ve been around for very long, you know that for a few years we did what’s called the MDM Celebration, and it’s been in Utah and it’s been in Texas. We’ve reintroduced it. It’s going to be in Utah again. The venue there is fantastic, and we have quite a large following all along the West Coast, so we’re going to be back in Utah on September 26th—that Saturday.

We started selling tickets, and they’ve been selling well, and I’m super excited to see you there. But we added something additional, and some of you may not know this, so I want to make sure you’re aware of it. We have added a sneak peek workshop and a year-long community. This is a mentored community that’s going to be available from the moment you sign up all the way through the event in September.

This is important because as Mothers of Creation, it’s not just going to happen overnight. We have so much content, and as I was going through it, I thought, wow—what if we could get a head start on this? What if we could start learning it now? What if we could be practicing some of the key concepts all throughout the year, becoming Mothers of Creation? Then when we get to the event, we’ll just hit the ground running and put our plans together.

We’ll have our declaration statement—our creator declaration statement—all tied up by the end of the day, and you’ll be off to the races.

So what we’ve done is this: on January 29th, Lindsay and I are going to give a workshop in our MDM community, and there’s a private, exclusive-access group in the community for those who are coming to the celebration.

All you have to do is get a ticket to the celebration, and this workshop and the mentored community—all throughout the rest of the year leading up to the event—are available to you. Some of the things we’re going to cover in this workshop are the origins of the drama triangle, what drama is and why it matters, how drama shows up in your everyday life, and the types of victims.

This is really unique. I don’t know anyone else who teaches this, aside from a few places where you can get a little bit of information in the TED community, but we’ve put our own spin on it. We’ve also come up with antidotes. We’re going to help you identify the type of victim you show up as, how you show up as that type of victim, the antidote for that, and how to snap out of victimhood.

Then you’re going to be in this mentored community with other attendees. You’ll meet them, collaborate with them, and be mentored. Lindsay is going to mentor that group for the rest of the year and take you through additional content in the community. You do not want to miss it.

I’ll put the description below the podcast, or you can go to themissiondrivenmom.com, click on “Conference,” and sign up so you don’t miss that Thursday night, January 29th workshop. If for some reason you can’t make it live, don’t worry—it’s recorded, so you can hop into the community anytime.

Whenever you sign up for the event, you can watch the recording and join the community. And you are going to want your girlfriends, your sisters, your mother, and your grandmother to participate in this opportunity. It will give you shared language, help you support each other, and help you really infuse your home with a creator mindset.

I want to tell you about one of our students, Leanna, and what she shared with us a few years ago. Of course, she had a deep dive in creator orientation, as well as many other awesome principles in the Academy, so she’s coming from that perspective. But we are covering this content at this event.

Here’s what she said. She said it’s given us a common language. She’s talking about the Academy and understanding drama and creator orientation. She said the principle that is the opposite of victim is creator. It blew my mind wide open, and it blew my relationships wide open with my children.

Just the other day, I was having a hard day. I was tired, stressed, under pressure, and I was being impatient with my children—and they could feel it. My oldest came to me and said, “Okay, Mom, I want to create right now. I want to be a creator.”

Why could her son say that? Because she had been teaching them the principles. She had taught her family how to be creators instead of victims.

Her son said, “I want to be kind and find someone to serve. I’m going to give you a big hug.” He came over, gave me a hug, and asked, “Can I make you some breakfast?” I said yes.

What was so powerful about that—this is still Leanna talking—was that it was really sweet, of course, but the power behind it was that I had learned that principle and that language, and I had taught it to my kids. It gave our whole family a common language we could use.

They knew I wasn’t perfect. I could talk to them about my struggles, and then they could come help and serve me when I needed it.

Right away, it melted me. I thought, I’m being a victim right now, and because I’m being a victim, I’m also being a persecutor to everyone around me. Instantly, I thought, okay, how am I going to create? I hugged my son back and said, “I’m going to make breakfast with you.” We turned on music, had a dance party in the kitchen, and it changed the entire day.

That’s the power. Every day I’m trying to apply those principles, and it’s been really life-changing.

Alright, let’s talk for the next few minutes about why modern motherhood is leaving mothers empty. I was reading an article the other day, and I want to read you just the first part because it really sets the stage. This is from the blog of Sarah E. Frazer.

“As we left the kids with my parents and in-laws—we now have to divide them up, since we have five kids—I felt a sense of relief, like a burden was being lifted off my shoulders.

My husband and I were going out of town without the kids. Freedom. We both giggled like newlyweds. As we drove off, we spent our vacation sleeping in each morning, relaxing by the pool, and talking with no interruptions. I didn’t have to cut up food or get five other plates ready before sitting down to my cold meal.

When we wanted to just sit, I could close my eyes and enjoy the quiet without having to keep an eye on a little one for seven days. We enjoyed talking to each other, reading, and eating together in peace.

Only, that’s not my regular life. In fact, my house is pretty loud and crazy in this season right now.”

Motherhood is not for the faint of heart.

Amen.

For you new moms out there, I feel you. The routine of it all is enough to make our hearts restless. Did we really sign up for this day after day? The same seemingly empty tasks feel incomplete, leaving us feeling empty. Endless meals, dirty clothes, and constant decisions can make us feel useless.

All we want is an escape. I’ve felt this. I’ve been guilty of surfing the internet, flipping through social media, and watching pointless videos just to escape the moment. Motherhood can leave me empty. The natural tendency of my heart is to feel empty and immediately want to fill it—frantically.

I look around thinking maybe buying more things, planning more trips, exercising, or having a job will fill the emptiness. But it doesn’t.

That’s exactly what we’re talking about.

And I’m going to give you three reasons why this is happening to modern women. It’s not that women in the past never felt emptiness or struggle, but there are specific things that have been taken from us—ways our culture has shifted—that are making it harder.

The culture is not proud of us. In fact, sometimes it thinks that we are not doing enough. Sometimes even our husbands think that if we don’t go out into the workforce and earn a lot of money, we are not doing our job. We are not doing enough.

Now, not that you can’t be a working mom—it’s just that we feel unappreciated. We feel invalidated. And really, one of the only rewards for us is the love of our own children and the fulfillment we feel from doing that job.

Sometimes we wonder if we’ve even done the right thing. We feel pressured to perform in the marketplace, earn money, or justify our choices because of what the feminist movement did to our culture. So the solution to this first problem is for us to link arms and change the narrative, and that’s what The Mission Driven Mom is doing.

That’s our mission and message—that motherhood matters, and that we can link arms as we build principle-centered homes. We can also lift our culture, make it more principle-centered, and rewrite the story of what femininity is, what motherhood means, and why it matters so much.

And we have a vested interest—maybe more than anybody else—because we know we are building the world our children will live in.

So we can push back. We can reaffirm the incredible courage it takes to be a mother, how vital it is, and what it means to be the best mother you can be. I talked about this last week—what it does for you in so many meaningful ways.

One of our students shared this—her name is Valerie Kinkcaid. This is what she said:

“I’m almost done with Level One of the MDM Academy. I’m just finishing up the last little bit of it, and before I started, life was good. I had a good marriage and cute kids, but I wasn’t feeling happy, and I didn’t know why.”

Again—that Betty Friedan “problem that has no name,” right? So what’s the prescription? If that’s the problem, what’s the prescription? We have to get the prescription right, and then we have to follow it if we want the results.

Valerie goes on:

“I had every reason to be happy, but I felt like there was something I needed to change, and I didn’t know what. I didn’t know where to start or what was wrong.”

That’s exactly how women were feeling in the sixties.

But now, going through Level One and learning things like the drama triangle and being in the box—and she lists several of the principles she learned—all of those things we teach in Level One have totally changed how I view myself. It’s changed everything, and it’s been a huge help for me.

So we don’t say in the MDM Academy that you need to go get a job in order to feel fulfilled, in order to be proud of your motherhood, or in order to thrive as a woman and a mother—to be a mission-driven mom, which we’ll talk more about next week and being on that mission-driven journey.

That’s just not what you need to do.

And I know this is a shameless plug for the Academy, but it is—because we know it works. And even if you don’t join the Academy, I hope you’ll learn all about what being a mission-driven mom means. I hope you’ll go to the website, get the free audiobook, and come to our celebration to become a Mother of Creation.

Now, before we talk about the second reason modern motherhood leaves us feeling empty, I want to give you some context about where I was.

As I’ve shared on this podcast and in many other places, when I was a young mother of three small children, I was struggling in every conceivable way. My husband had a pornography addiction. We had one income, and it was sporadic. Both of our parents were divorcing or separated.

There were extended family issues. I was trying to figure out how to be a mom to young children. Our finances were troubling. There were so many things in my life that felt incredibly overwhelming, and I didn’t know how to manage them.

I remember sitting with myself one day, thinking, I just feel awful. I feel unmotivated. I don’t know how to do this right.

I was angry. I was frustrated. I was overwhelmed. And something snapped.

I realized in that moment: wait a minute—I went to fifteen years of formal education, and it did not prepare me for this moment. What in the world were we doing?

Why was I in school all those years if it didn’t teach me how to be a wife, a mother, or a fulfilled individual? If it didn’t show me how to manage extended family relationships, finances, or career? What in the world?

I felt so cheated.

And then one thing led to another, and I started searching for answers.

I searched for a year, and then I found liberal education.

This is the story I always tell—my sister-in-law told me about this small college, and I went to their website. It listed all the readings. It said they were reading Plato.

I thought, what in the world? I can’t believe I read Plato.

That sounded so different from anything I had ever tried—and maybe something that might work. I didn’t know what else to try, so I went on that journey.

I learned that liberal education used to be the go-to. It was always done—reading original writings, looking for true principles, focusing on the good, the true, and the beautiful, and virtue as the fundamental end of education.

These educational truths were so rich and fulfilling. I found them as a mother of three, then four, then five, then six, and over time I earned a liberal arts bachelor’s degree and a liberal arts master’s degree. I’m incredibly grateful for that.

But this education has been robbed.

I could give you a whole history of American education and explain how Charles Eliot at Harvard, in 1899, introduced the elective system. Once he did that, all the other Ivy League schools followed suit, and eventually we lost the foundation of liberal arts.

Even in the forties, people noticed it—C.S. Lewis noticed it. Mortimer Adler noticed it. Robert Hutchins noticed it. That’s why they created the Great Books of the Western World.

The point is: you and I were robbed of this education.

Not just formal education. Not just what we would have received in American schools. And I know not as many women went to university, but it didn’t matter, because education at younger ages used to be rich, intentional, and principle-centered.

We were one of the first countries to institutionalize free education for children. But the context, the conversations, the Socratic method—we didn’t get it.

And on top of that, we didn’t get proper training.

There are many reasons for this. If you’ve ever read the book Laddie by Gene Stratton-Porter—who also wrote the Limberlost books—it’s her autobiography.

She describes how, in the mid-1800s, girls in her family couldn’t even be courted by a man—let alone married—until their mother left home for a month and they ran the entire farm themselves. They had to prove they knew what they were doing.

So here you have rich formal education—not about earning money, but becoming your best self—and practical training to succeed as a wife and mother at a much higher level.

We have to try to get that back.

The net result of losing this is that we weren’t raised with the skills to discern truth. And so motherhood feels inevitably overwhelming.

We’re responsible for these little ones, but we don’t know how to recognize truth. We don’t know how to discern in this culture. We don’t know how to level ourselves up or put our families on a foundation of principles.

So of course, the solution is education.

I know that sounds crazy, but it’s true. You can train your mind. You can learn to live according to principles.

Someone reached out to me just today and asked, “Where can I learn to live according to principles?”

And I had to be honest—I don’t know where else you can get this.

For twenty years, I’ve been learning, studying, practicing, teaching, and mentoring. Other women have joined me, and together we’ve built something truly special.

But if you’re not ready yet, go grab a classic. Start asking better questions. Have conversations with the authors.

Get my book, The Mission-Driven Life, the free audiobook, and start living those seven laws of life mission. Start reading better things.

Surround yourself with what is true, good, and beautiful—right now, today. You can choose that every minute of your day.

Read good children’s classics. The Narnia series. The Little House series. The Little Britches series. Mine them for truth.

Read Little Women. Pay attention to the mothers.

These are things you can do right now to uplevel your game.

Carolyn Marriott, one of our students, said this:

“I’ve learned that I just need to think better and differently. Instead of trying to do more, I need to think differently and seek to understand and find truth.”

That’s why it’s so important—if you don’t want modern motherhood to leave you feeling empty—you must change how you think.

There’s a lot of good material out there about affirmations and positive thinking, and we cover that too. But this is deeper than that.

Thinking critically. Analyzing well. Understanding the nature of truth. Knowing how to mine for it.

That’s vital.

Max Lucado shares this story:

“I recently met a 20-year-old who needed to hear this, just discharged from the military. He was pondering his future. He bore a square jaw, a forearm tattoo, and a common question. He didn’t know what to do with the rest of his life.

As we shared a flight, he told me about his uncle, a New England priest. ‘What a great man,’ the ex-soldier sighed. ‘He helps kids and feeds the hungry. I’d love to make a difference like that.’

So I asked him the question of this chapter: What were some occasions when you did something you loved to do and did it well?

He dismissed me at first. ‘Ah, what I love to do is stupid.’

‘Try me,’ I invited.

‘I love to rebuild stuff.’

‘What do you mean?’

He spoke of an old coffee table he found in the garage, seeing its potential. He shaved off the paint, fixed the broken legs, and restored it with great pride. He presented it to his mom.

‘Tell me another time,’ I prompted.

‘This one is really dumb,’ he discounted. ‘But when I worked at a butcher shop, I used to find meat on the bones others threw out. My boss loved me. I could find several pounds of product just by giving the bone a second try.’

As the plane was nosing down, I tested a possibility with him.

‘You love to salvage stuff. You salvage furniture. You salvage meat. God gave you the ability to find treasure in someone else’s trash.’

My idea surprised him.

‘God did that?’

‘Yes. God. Your ability to restore a table is every bit as holy as your uncle’s ability to restore a life.’

You would’ve thought he’d just been handed a newborn baby. As my words sank in, the tough soldier teared up.”

And my message to you today on this third point is Max Lucado’s message right here:

“See your desires as gifts to heed rather than longings to suppress, and you’ll feel the same joy.”

I have a quote up on my vision wall that says something like, the dreams you nurture in your heart are the most noble part of you.

So pay attention to what you do well, what you like to do, and why you love to do it.

Here’s another one of our students:

“I didn’t think I had a lot of gifts, but through MDM Academy, I’ve really discovered my gifts and talents and come to appreciate them on another level. I feel like I use them with more respect and reverence for myself and the gifts I’ve been given.

I discovered myself in a new way and how to focus on my strengths. I now see the power of being focused on the things I’m good at.”

And that’s what you can do.

Start with this book, and then go on a journey of trying things you’ve never tried before. I say this on the podcast often—I give this as a solution often—because I know these are the things that work.

These are the things that turn you back on. They make you feel alive again. And you can do them right there with your kids.

Years ago, my husband had always wanted to take karate. So you know what he did? He took karate with my two younger kids. They now have all these incredible memories together—doing karate, serving in that space, helping with events, and being a force for good in the community.

They did something they loved, together.

And you can do that too. I promise. You absolutely can.

So remember—let’s push back on the narrative of who mothers are and what we mean. We’re going to talk about that in more detail next week.

Get the education you deserve by picking up a classic and surrounding yourself with enriching things. And then get to know yourself and develop your talents.

I would love to hear in the comments below which of these three you plan to work on and dive into.

Next week, we’re going to talk more in depth about going beyond being “just a mom” and becoming a mission-driven mom—what that looks like, the six traits of a mission-driven mom, and why they matter so much.

Thank you so much for joining me here today. And again, remember—I want to see you and your friends, your sisters, your mom, your grandma, and your nieces at our January 29th workshop and in that private, exclusive community for celebration attendees.

I will see you there.

Are you questioning whether you want a family, marriage, or children? As more women choose to be single and childfree, conversations about feminism, happiness, and personal fulfillment are everywhere. By 2030, nearly half of women ages 25–44 are projected to be single and without children, and many are celebrating this as freedom, empowerment, and choice. 

In this episode, I offer a thoughtful pushback. Not to shame, not to judge, but to invite deeper thinking. Drawing on decades of experience working with women and families, long-term research on happiness and wellbeing, and my own deeply personal story, I walk through four essential truths every woman deserves to consider before deciding she’s “out” on marriage and family. We talk about why relationships matter more than we’ve been told, why feminism hasn’t delivered the happiness it promised, how meaning is inseparable from responsibility, and why wanting something isn’t the same as needing it. This conversation may challenge you, but if you’re willing to stay with it, it might also change how you see your future, your relationships, and your own potential. 

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LINKS MENTIONED IN THE EPISODE  

What is a good life?
https://youtu.be/8KkKuTCFvzI?si=S6Q101owT9uVaw9D 

Books Referenced
The End of Woman by Carrie Gress https://a.co/d/3Sdsh0a 

Mere Christianity by CS Lewis https://a.co/d/gMuVf98 

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey https://a.co/d/gP6X4bU 

Reforming Education by Mortimer Adler https://a.co/d/2OvbaY0 

What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us by Danielle Crittenden https://a.co/d/bFGTxkk

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Transcript (AI Generated)

Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission-Driven Life, founder of The Mission Driven Mom, and I’m so glad you’re joining me today.

This episode is a pushback to a recent phenomenon circulating on social media. It centers around a statistic that claims that by 2030, an estimated 45% of women ages 25 to 44 will be single and child-free.

There are many young women saying they are choosing to go without family—that it’s not what they want, that they want something else, and that they know what they want. They believe that what they want will make them happy.

I’m going to give you four really important things to consider if you are in this camp. I’m pushing back on the assumption that this is all fine and well—that you should “do you,” that this is your truth, and that it’s automatically the right thing for you.

This podcast will probably make some people mad. Some of you will say, “Audrey, you’ve been married over 30 years. You haven’t been in the dating market. You stayed home and raised kids. You don’t get a voice here.”

My argument is that this is exactly why I do get a voice. I’ve worked with thousands of women—especially mothers. I know women. I know what many women want, and I know many of the problems this life choice creates. If you think you don’t want a family, you need to think again.

I’m going to keep this tight. I’ll link resources in the description if you want to go deeper.

One of the most important talks you could ever watch is Robert Waldinger’s TED Talk, What Makes a Good Life. It explains—objectively—what creates long-term happiness.

At Mission Driven Mom, we believe in truths that are always true. One of them is this: relationships are everything.

Waldinger presents the longest scientific study in history—a Harvard study spanning over 85 years and multiple generations. Researchers tracked hundreds of men, their wives, and now their children, collecting extensive physical, emotional, relational, and neurological data.

After decades of analysis, the conclusion was clear: good relationships keep us happier and healthier, period.

They determine physical health, mental health, longevity, memory retention, and overall life satisfaction. People without quality life partners experienced earlier cognitive decline, poorer health, and shorter lives.

Warm, supportive relationships are protective. Conflict is normal, but trust is essential. If you want the best health, fulfillment, and happiness, you need a partner you can rely on.

Every great thinker across history agrees on this: growth requires risk. And the greatest risk is giving your heart.

Many women respond by saying, “There are no good men,” or “We can replace family with friendships.” I’ll address that shortly.

C.S. Lewis once said that children playing happily in a mud puddle will reject an invitation to the sea because they don’t know what the sea is like. That’s what happens when we reject marriage and family without fully understanding what we’re walking away from.

I don’t doubt your pain. I don’t doubt your bad experiences. I know there’s luck involved, loss involved, abandonment involved. I’ve experienced abandonment myself.

I’m not saying you control everything. I am saying you deserve better information before making one of the biggest decisions of your life.

By many objective measures, women’s lives have improved. But multiple studies—including Yale Law and the National Library of Medicine—show that women’s subjective happiness has declined, both absolutely and relative to men.

Women today report being less happy than women in the 1950s.

I’m not saying feminism caused all problems or brought no benefits. I am saying it deserves honest scrutiny.

Second-wave feminism taught women that vulnerability—especially motherhood—was the problem. The solution? Become more like men. Eliminate dependency. Erase patriarchy.

But vulnerability is not a flaw; it’s part of being human.

Authors like Carrie Gress and Danielle Crittenden document how feminism misdiagnosed women’s suffering and prescribed a fix that ignored womanhood itself. Instead of healing women, it slowly erased them.

Even popular culture revealed the cracks. In the 1980s, Cosmopolitan published maps showing where women could move to find husbands due to a “man shortage.”

Sixty years later, women are still unhappy—and still being told to lean in harder.

I’m not advocating a return to the past. I’m a business owner. I value progress. But rejecting family entirely is not progress—it’s confusion rooted in incomplete information.

Jordan Peterson and others articulate what we intuitively know: careers—even dream careers—cannot meet all human needs.

Meaning comes from responsibility.

Independence feels good, but interdependence is the higher principle. You want responsibility on steroids? Raise a child. You can’t quit. You can’t walk away. You can’t outsource it.

Rights and duties are two sides of the same coin. The deepest joy comes with the greatest responsibility.

We grow when we’re challenged. Family forces empathy, forgiveness, patience, humility, and selflessness—virtues that make us fully human.

Alfred Adler taught that needs are absolute, wants are relative. We often want things that harm us and avoid things that would help us thrive.

Our culture glorifies “do what you want,” yet the most fulfilled people consistently do what they need.

Maybe we need family. Maybe we need deep partnership. The Harvard study strongly suggests we do.

Loneliness is now a declared epidemic. Humans are social beings. Relationships are not optional.

I’ve been married nearly 32 years. My marriage has been incredibly hard. We’ve faced addiction, betrayal, financial devastation, parenting challenges, and loss.

We made it not because it was easy—but because we both wanted it and committed to learning how to love better.

I’ve watched my sons do everything possible to save their marriages—therapy, books, humility—only to be left. There are good men. Many women can’t see them because culture has taught them to fear vulnerability and expect fantasy.

Don’t decide yet.

Comfort today does not equal fulfillment tomorrow.

Every woman—single or married—should work on herself and learn how to build healthy relationships. Love is action. Boundaries teach. Forgiveness frees. Humility begins all progress.

You don’t get to rewrite human nature. You don’t get to ignore truths that have worked for millennia.

If you’re scared, I get it. If you’ve been hurt, I get it. But you don’t know who you could become if you commit to growth.

Relationships are everything.

Thank you for listening. I know some of you will be upset. Others may feel seen. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If you want to learn more about Mission Driven Mom, visit themissiondrivenmom.com and download the first three chapters of The Mission-Driven Life.

I’ll see you next time.

In this episode, Audrey unpacks the difference between healthy shame (guilt tied to real wrongdoing) and unhealthy shame (false beliefs about our worth) and explains how confusing the two leads to emotional pain—especially during the holidays. Using real-life examples, she shows how unhealthy shame damages relationships, triggers emotional overreactions, and keeps us stuck. Audrey teaches listeners to recognize the source of their feelings, take responsibility only for true guilt, release false shame, draw their worth from God, and use empowering questions to reframe difficult interactions. Through daily self-care, preemptive reflection, and intentional communication, we can transform holiday stress into opportunities for healing, confidence, and deeper, more loving relationships.

How to Conquer Worries: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/how-to-conquer-worries

The Miracle Morning app: https://miraclemorning.app/

Get Your FREE Chapters in Audio format from The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

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Transcript (AI Generated)

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher. I'm the author of The Mission Driven Life and the founder of The Mission Driven Mom—and happy holidays. I'm so excited for you to join me. Listen to this fascinating quote. It says, “Peter Sheehan: that deep fear we all have of being wrong, of being belittled, and of feeling less than is what stops us from taking the very risks required to move us forward.”

That's what we're going to talk about for a few minutes today: what is going on with us when we're worried and dreading, maybe even a little bit, the holidays? Because we’re worried about these relationships where we might feel bad interacting with certain people. Last week we spent a little bit of time talking about what to do if we’re worried about the holidays, if we're dreading interacting with these people.

I gave you three tools. We talked about why you might be dreading it and three tools that you can use to better manage it. One really important one was taking time for yourself every morning. I gave you the recommendation of the Miracle Morning app so you could visualize and pray and do all of those things each morning to buoy yourself up.

And we talked about what to do in specific situations with certain types of worry, and then I gave you another tool: asking empowering questions. I also gave you an opt-in of a mini-training that you still need to go get because it's going to help you with this week's tools as well.

So by the end of this podcast, you are going to understand the two types of shame, and you are going to have a little toolset for knowing what to do when you get into that really uncomfortable situation that you don't want to be in with someone, and you're just not sure how to manage yourself because you're not feeling the way you want to feel.

So first, let's talk about these two types of shame. I'm going to give you the framework of a very simple scenario—you may have experienced it; I've experienced it—of what might happen to you as a mother in terms of a simple, everyday experience with shame. Then we're going to break it down.

This is what one woman explained: “One time I stopped to get gas and my credit card was declined. The guy gave me a really hard time. As I pulled out of the station, my three-year-old son started crying, and I just started screaming, ‘Shut up.’ I was so ashamed about my card. I went nuts. Then I was ashamed that I yelled at my son.”

Now, in a normal situation, or kind of an average explanation you might find online, somebody might say, “Well, you shouldn't feel ashamed like she did. You should never be ashamed. You need to affirm yourself. You need to tell yourself that you are incredible,” and all of that.

Well, it is the case that there are different kinds of shame, and not understanding that is going to make you either really struggle to overcome the shame or handle it in all the wrong ways. And so just understanding that there are two types, that they are both at play in this scenario, and that they happen to us all the time, is going to empower you to know what to do better.

Healthy shame is a voice from your true self. We could also say it’s a voice from God. If you want to go back and listen to the “Two Consciences” podcast I did a few months ago, that's a really nice companion to this one because that’s what I talked about there—how you have a divine conscience, and it's different from the social conscience. And there’s some dovetailing and layering between shame and the conscience, which is really, really important to keep in mind.

So healthy shame is coming from that divine place—the true sense of what is really right and wrong, the morality. It's something deep inside you that says, “You're better than this. I should not have done that. That was not the right thing to do.”

Here are some examples of ways we experience shame—but healthy shame:

These are instances where you legitimately did something wrong, and you feel ashamed about it because you really did something wrong. You've betrayed your conscience. You've broken principles and natural laws. You've done something you know to be wrong. The point here is that you did something wrong. It is behavior-focused. Healthy shame is only about actions—things we actually did. This is super important to remember.

Unhealthy shame is a voice from the false self. This is the tempter. This is how we don’t tell ourselves the truth. This is a lie we are believing.

Louis Smeeds said this about unhealthy shame: “The pain from this shame is not a signal of something wrong in us that needs to be made right. Our shame is what is wrong with us. It is a false shame, or an unhealthy shame, because the feeling has no basis in reality.”

I'm going to say that again: the feeling has no basis in reality. It is unhealthy shame we do not deserve because we are not as bad as our feelings tell us we are.

It’s so important to remember: your feelings can lie to you, just like your thoughts can lie to you. Just like we all lie to ourselves sometimes—and other people, unintentionally or sometimes even with good intentions, lie to us. It is our goal, our mandate as mission-driven moms, to be truth seekers who want the truth wherever it is, whatever it is, and whatever source it’s coming from.

Unhealthy shame tells us that we are bad. It is person-focused. You didn't do anything legitimately against morality. You didn't even necessarily disobey your conscience. You've honestly tried your best and something bad happened—or something you don’t like—and you feel like, “I am wrong. There's something broken about me.”

Some examples of unhealthy shame might be:

Yet in both healthy and unhealthy shame, whatever the source, you feel yucky. You feel guilty. You feel awful. It feels like something is wrong.

And I think this is why it's so easy to conflate the two and just think, “Well, if I ever feel ashamed, then that's never me.” And this is something the world gets wrong. It tells you that anytime you feel ashamed at all, you should deflect it, tell other people they're wrong, play the victim, or ignore the changes your conscience is lovingly trying to help you make.

But when we recognize there are two different kinds of shame, then we can put them both into proper perspective.

When it’s unhealthy shame, then you are the shame. And because you can't stop being you, you feel wrong at the core. You feel helpless. You feel despair because you can't stop being you, and you don't know a way out. You feel trapped and broken.

That's why unhealthy shame is always bad. It's always the wrong perspective, and we need to reframe what we’re thinking and what we’re telling ourselves when we get caught in unhealthy shame.

This is where we have to be better discerners. This is where principles can really come to our aid. When we understand natural law properly and understand how to delineate a principle, it's so much easier to parse out the lies and the truths we’re telling ourselves—to identify the unhealthy and the healthy shame.

But I'm going to give you some tools you can use right now—some really valuable questions—and then we're going to use that same tool from last week: empowering questions.

What's really important to recognize—and I’ve already mentioned it—is knowing the difference between unhealthy and healthy shame. Healthy shame is more appropriately called guilt: “I did something bad, and I feel guilty.”

Shame, in the unhealthy sense, is: “I am bad.”

There are some people who are just intensely shame-based. It becomes their identity or worldview. And often those people do have enough trauma in their past that they just have to do more work. They can definitely see who they really are, but it’s more work.

Let's be clear: we all experience unhealthy shame. We all experience both types. We all conflate them. We all feel confused by them, and we all want to run away because whatever situation we’re in feels super embarrassing.

So let's go back to the beginning scenario. This mom is trying to get gas. Her credit card isn't working. The guy is “shaming” her—telling her something is wrong with her because her card won’t work. There's something wrong with him that he’s shaming her. We can't let other people's perspectives get us hung up.

Remember, she said, “I was so ashamed about my card. I went nuts.” This is important to recognize because if we have a relationship with someone that's already uncomfortable, or if we have scenarios in our family that are emotionally complicated—where for some reason we feel less than—then simple events trigger deep reactions.

For me, especially with my husband's family, there was a time when I felt embarrassed and ashamed because we didn't have as much money as many people in his family. They had nicer things, they gave their children more, and I experienced a lot of embarrassment and shame over that.

They were not doing anything wrong. They were just living their lives and having success. It had nothing to do with me. They liked me just fine. But I was creating complications in my relationships with them because of my unhealthy shame. And I was creating that unhealthy shame by comparing myself to them and telling myself I was less than—that something was wrong with me because I wasn’t giving my children the same things or having the same success. I decided we must not be as smart. Then I went all the way down the rabbit hole to my worth.

That is what lies at the heart of unhealthy shame: we have our worth tied up in something that has nothing to do with our worth. We’re no longer drawing our worth from God, and we’re no longer telling ourselves the truth. We're caught up in lies. We're not asking good empowering questions.

So we turn normal everyday situations—just like going to dinner with extended family—into our own torture chambers, beating ourselves up and making ourselves miserable simply because people are living their lives. Then maybe someone says something teasing or slightly judgmental, and suddenly I'm down in that awful place of “I'm broken. I can’t be fixed. Something is wrong with us. Why can’t we get the same results?”

So with the woman at the gas station: why was she ashamed about her credit card? Because her worth was wrapped up in it—because she believed something was wrong with her that her card wasn't working.

She could have said, “This is so frustrating that my card isn’t working, but this happens to everyone. I'm going to pull over and figure it out.” Or if she’s standing in front of the guy—even if he’s berating her—if her worth wasn’t wrapped up in her money or credit card, she might have said, “Sir, you’ve probably had a time in your life when your credit card didn’t work. I’m not sure what the problem is here, but let’s figure it out.”

Even if there truly wasn’t enough money in her account—embarrassing, sure—she could say, “Lots of people have been in this situation. I’m sorry I didn’t check beforehand. Let’s come up with a solution.”

Then, instead of staying in a problem-centered space, she would be in a solution-centered space—where she should be as a true creator, which is what we want to be as mission-driven moms. We deep-dive into this in the Academy because your worth should not be tied up in any of that stuff. That’s where unhealthy shame comes from.

But we can see these situations clearly. We can parse them out. We can see the unhealthy shame from the healthy shame. We can recognize when it’s guilt and when it’s shame.

Let me read you this quote about unhealthy shame from Brené Brown:

“If you roughly divide the men and women I've interviewed into two groups—those who feel a deep sense of love and belonging and those who struggle for it—there’s only one variable that separates the groups: those who feel lovable, who love, and who experience belonging simply believe they are worthy of love and belonging.”

Because this woman's worth was tied up in her money and her credit card and how she looked to other people, she wasn't drawing her worth from the proper places. She wasn't having a healthy perspective and telling herself the truth and asking empowering questions and being solution-focused.

Well, then she had this shame. Here's what I really want you to recognize and take away from this, because this, I think, is really at the heart of some of the reasons why we're dreading the holidays and some of the issues that we have around these complicated relationships with other people—just like me with my extended family and me creating all of this shame around just a normal family interaction.

Instead, I could have been proud of who I was and proud of the choices I was making and recognizing that I was a really good mom and that my kids didn't need stuff in order to feel loved. I could have been affirming myself and telling myself the truth and asking myself empowering questions when I went there, like, “How can I love them better? How can I find out more about their lives? How can I see what we have in common?” All those things that I could have been doing—the tools that I didn't have then that I have now, which I'm so grateful for.

It was the original unhealthy shame that helped instigate the healthy shame. She said she was also ashamed that she yelled at her son.

The healthy shame was that she felt guilty because she yelled at her child, and that's a legitimate thing that she actually did wrong. Her conscience was like, “You shouldn't yell at your kid.” Why is she yelling at her child? It's because she feels awful.

Now, we're always responsible for our choices, no matter how we feel. But if we already feel ashamed, we're more likely to act out in shaming ways. We're more likely to do things that cause us more shame because we do things we know to be wrong that we legitimately feel guilty about later.

So I hope that really sinks in. Think about that. If you allow yourself to engage in unhealthy shame, you are more likely to cause yourself guilt and more shame.

So what we have to do is we have to tackle who you have troubled relationships with. You've interacted with these people before. You know what stuff might come up. You know the comparisons that you might make. You know the unhealthy things you might be tempted to say. You know the kinds of things they might say to you or what might go down, so you can prepare beforehand.

I love the quote, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” This is why you're going to do your Miracle Morning every day over the holidays, because you're going to keep yourself in a good place. You're going to take care of yourself first. You're going to meet your needs. You're going to envision what you want these holidays to look like and how you're going to show up. You're going to journal and be grateful and exercise for a few minutes and just do those things that are going to center you.

You're going to draw your worth from God, and you're going to remind yourself that there's unhealthy shame, and you are not going to let other people make you feel ashamed when you shouldn't, because you haven't done anything wrong. This is so, so, so important.

That clerk participated in this woman's sense of shame by the way he was treating her, but she had the power to stop him. She had the power to tell him that she refused to feel ashamed for something she didn't do wrong.

So this is why you're going to take care of yourself first. If you did not get that mini training, you're going to go grab it. It's in the description again this week. You're going to really practice those empowering questions, and you're going to let your brilliant mind think on those empowering questions. You're going to pray over them, you're going to ponder them, you can maybe ask other people them, and you're going to let your marvelous mind find new, creative solutions to old problems.

Because you're going to be solution-focused, right? And you're going to be the person who is not going to feel guilty for something that she didn't do wrong. But you're also going to be the person who is the first one to have the courage to own up to what you did do wrong, because both of those things nurture your self-image. Both of those things help you feel in control of yourself, in control of your life, and centered and worthy.

So the first thing that you're going to do when you have an interaction is prepare ahead of time. You're going to use those empowering questions. You're going to use that training to start jotting down where you might get caught up this Christmas—what might happen over the holidays that might be an issue for you. You're going to write your empowering questions, and you're going to carry them around with you.

You're going to do that prevention with Miracle Morning and with empowering questions to prepare you. Now we're going to talk for just a minute about what you're going to do in those situations that might arise in the moment.

You have an interaction—or you don't even have an interaction. Maybe this is all going on in your head. My husband and I can have so many conversations and give so many examples to you of ways that we've done this together and individually, with many, many people in our lives, of “horriblizing” them and putting ourselves on a moral pedestal or demeaning ourselves and just not seeing ourselves and others honestly. That's what we have to learn how to do.

So let's say that you just notice that you're feeling these bad feelings that you don't want to feel, and you're especially feeling them even just toward yourself. You find yourself demeaning yourself or feeling like you don't like yourself, or telling yourself things that you don't want to hear—things that you wouldn't tell somebody else that you really love. Or you have this bad interaction, and you're in this negative place.

The first thing that you're going to do is check in on your healthy shame. You're just going to ask about good old-fashioned guilt: “Is there something in this relationship that I am legitimately responsible for fixing? Have I potentially done something to hurt this person in the past?”

This is preemptive work you can do as well. You can anticipate the experiences that you're going to have with these people at the holidays. You can anticipate what's going to happen by actually trying to repair relationships before the event happens. That's also some of the ounce of prevention that you can do.

The point I want to make here is that what we tend to do at the holidays is make it all about the external stuff. It's all about the parties and the decorations and the gifts and the cookies and the caroling. And the traditions matter—do not get me wrong. You're creating beautiful memories that your children will cherish. But actually, the only reason you're doing all of that external stuff is to enrich the relationships, to build happy memories for yourself and your family, and to build bonds.

So I don't want you to tell yourself this holiday season that you don't have time to sit with yourself and negotiate relationships—that you're too busy and you'll “handle it after the holidays.” That is a lie.

If you do a little bit of preemptive work—if you will write down some empowering questions, if you'll just sit with yourself tonight when you go to bed and spend an extra half an hour before you fall asleep and do a little bit of preemptive work—the holidays will be a million times better. Even if Uncle Joe shows up and says the thing he always says, even if everybody else is exactly the same, because you are different, it will be different for you.

And when you show up different for people because you're different—because you've worked on you—then it always forces other people to respond differently. Maybe their initial reaction won't be exactly what you want or expect, but it will heal. You have the power to initiate the healing.

Sometimes you just are responsible for stuff. I was responsible for feeling jealous. That was something that I was doing that was 100% on me, and I owed myself and God—and probably them—an apology for building up a wall between us with my own negative feelings, with my own jealousy.

So I want to encourage you to evaluate beforehand and even in the moment. Leave the room for five minutes. Go sit in another room and just ask yourself—maybe even pray and talk to God about it. Maybe even bring in somebody that you trust—and really try to be honest: “Is there something in this relationship that I can take responsibility for that would actually help it move forward? Have I hurt this person in the past? Have I created walls? Have I been judgmental or comparing or negative or crabby or whatever, and do I genuinely need to fix this?”

Then write them a card or call them on the phone or give them a short visit. You can write it down beforehand so that you remember what you wanted to say, and it can be really simple. If it's not that big of a deal, I don't want you to blow it up into something that it doesn't need to be. But you can definitely initiate healing.

You can go to someone and say, “Look, our relationship has not been the best, and I'm the first one to admit that I have this part in that. I have not reached out to you as much as I could have. I have not been there for you in times when you needed help. I have been jealous of you, and I have—I'm sorry to say—talked badly about you sometimes when you weren't around. That's all on me, and I am very sorry. I want this holiday season to be better. We're going to spend time together, and I want it to be as beautiful as it can be. If you can find it in your heart to begin to forgive me, then let's start over. Let's see if this can be better.”

I'm not here trying to give you one more thing to do. I don't want you to listen to this and do that unhealthy shame thing again: “Oh, Audrey's giving me one more thing to do and I don't have time to do it. She's telling me to take time at the holidays and there's too much stuff going on.” I am giving you a gift, and the gift is the understanding of what's causing you pain and tools to begin to create healing and to make this holiday season better.

So if you can hear that, if you can accept that gift, if you can take it into your heart and recognize that in the relationships in your life that are not the way you want them to be, there might be something that you could genuinely apologize for—even if it's just a genuine misunderstanding—then you manage your unhealthy shame.

You use those empowering questions. You stop and do your gratitude. You take yourself out of the room and get yourself right again. You do not let other people shame you. You do not internalize that.

If someone says something to you like, “You shouldn't be this way,” or “You shouldn't be that way,” or “That was the wrong thing,” or they don't like your decorations, or that wasn't what they wanted for Christmas, or you are just wrong in some way that they don't like, then you're going to take a few minutes and ask some questions like, “Is this just me, or does this happen to other people?” Like with the credit card—does everybody sometimes not have money on their credit card? Probably a lot of us. Is that a normal human thing to happen? Yes. “I don't need to feel shame about that because that's a normal thing that happens to people.”

Then you can also ask yourself some other really good questions, like, “Why am I feeling ashamed for something I didn't do wrong? What is the truth about this situation, about this relationship, about me that I can focus on that's good? How can I see myself and this person more honestly?”

You can write those questions down. You can carry them around in your back pocket, and you can make this holiday season better. Even if it's just 1% better, that's better. And then it can be 1% better next year.

If you'll go get that mini training on how to stop worrying and start thriving and use those empowering questions and do the work ahead of time and do the work in the middle of these interactions—most of the time your presence isn't “do or die.” Most of the time at these Christmas gatherings you can step away for a minute. You can say, “Let's take a break. Let's pause gifts for a minute and come back after we've had a break,” or “You guys eat a piece of candy; I’ve got to go to the bathroom”—whatever you need to say to take a break and to renegotiate yourself, to reframe the situation for yourself, and tell yourself the truth.

So what are we going to do this holiday season? It's the week before Christmas. You've got a couple of weeks of interacting with people and attending parties. It's coming to a close, and now you're going to be with these people—maybe on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve, or whatever the case might be—or even just with yourself, and you want to be different. You want to show up differently.

So you're going to do the maintenance stuff and remember that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

And you're going to take care of yourself every day and ask empowering questions about how you can show up differently. When you start feeling ashamed, embarrassed, or negative, you're going to pull away and ask yourself, “Is this healthy or unhealthy shame?” Then you're going to take responsibility for what you've done.

If you yelled at somebody, if you were critical of them—whatever it might be—you’re just going to go apologize. Then you're going to use empowering questions to reframe the unhealthy shame and remind yourself that your worth is infinite, that you matter, that people love you, that you are lovable and loved, and that you just need to see everybody a little bit more honestly.

What you're practicing doing—these are just good principles that you're going to practice. Taking care of yourself every single day is a really important principle. Looking for whether it’s unhealthy or healthy shame is a really important principle. Taking responsibility for what you've done, with healthy shame, is a really important principle. And getting rid of the unhealthy shame is a really important principle as well.

A couple final thoughts. Remember that quote I gave you at the beginning? “That deep fear we all have of being wrong, of being belittled, of feeling less than is what stops us taking the very risks required to move us forward.” Admitting that we were jealous, saying we're sorry to people—those are the risks we have to take to move forward.

Taking full responsibility for the guilt for what is ours, then reframing all the unhealthy shame—that’s what we've got to do. And this is just such a beautiful thought to remember. This is Louis Smeeds:

“There is a nice irony in shame. Our feelings of inferiority are a sure sign of our superiority, and our feelings of worthlessness testify to our great worth.”

In other words, we could not feel less than if we were not truly superior and noble creatures. We could not feel unworthy if we did not have great worth. We are daughters of God who can end the unhealthy shame, take action where there's genuine guilt, and rise permanently above any unhealthy shame and begin to work toward our real potential.

And in the case of this holiday season, begin to have more of the loving, beautiful, connected, meaningful relationships that we long to have.

Go get that mini training. Use it all through the holidays. Come back and tell me how it went—what insights you had, how you reframed your unhealthy shame, how you took responsibility, and what was better this holiday season because of these really valuable principles.

And remember, next year we have some great things cooking for you. We will be back at the first of the year, and look for some really great stuff coming into your inbox over this Christmas holiday about the Mothers of Creation Celebration. It’s coming back. We haven't had this celebration for a few years. It’s back. Please join us this fall and look for those emails coming into your inbox about that.

Make sure to subscribe and leave a review. It helps others find us and know that quality content and true principles are taught here and that they can be blessed by those.

Have a very, very, very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

I will see you in 2026.

This episode explores why so many moms feel overwhelmed and stressed during the holidays, despite wanting to create meaningful memories for their families. Audrey identifies three main causes of holiday dread—unrealistic expectations, feeling responsible for everything and everyone, and constant worrying about future problems. She explains how simple mindset shifts and daily practices can dramatically reduce stress. 

Audrey invites listeners to reflect on their own childhood Christmas memories, reminding moms that what children remember most are the feelings, the connection, and the simple traditions—not perfection. She introduces the “Miracle Morning” routine as a transformative tool for grounding, gratitude, and emotional resilience. Finally, she teaches the power of turning worries into “empowering questions,” helping moms shift from fear and overwhelm to clarity, capability, and peace. 

The episode encourages moms to simplify holiday expectations, care for themselves daily, and approach challenges with empowered thinking so they can create truly joyful, meaningful experiences for their families. 

How to Conquer Worries: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/how-to-conquer-worries

The Miracle Morning app: https://miraclemorning.app/

Get Your FREE Chapters in Audio format from The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

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Transcript (AI Generated)

 Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission-Driven Life and Founder of The Mission-Driven Mom. I'm so excited for you to join me today as we talk about dreading the holidays—so to all you moms who are really not looking forward to it and are struggling with that. I read this statistic the other day: 80% of millennial moms are overwhelmed by the mental load of the Christmas holidays, and 65% are feeling pressured for perfect celebrations.

And when I saw those statistics, I just knew that we needed to talk about this for a few minutes today. So if the holidays are a stressful time of year for you, take heart. What you may not realize is that you’re actually stressed for specific reasons, and that there are ways you can manage that stress much better.

So by the time we get to the end of this podcast, you will have a clearer understanding of exactly why you are stressed, why you’re dreading the holidays, and some simple tools for managing that much better and making the holidays a much more joyful experience for you and your family. Now, first of all, why do you dread the holidays?

I don’t know if you’ve ever had this experience, but I have a recurring nightmare, and the nightmare goes something like this: it's Christmas Eve, and I’ve just realized that it’s Christmas Eve and I have no gifts for anybody. I don’t know what to do about this. I don’t have any money. I don’t have any gifts, and I don’t know what to do. And so I frantically run to the thrift store—that’s always my go-to in my dreams. And I get a cart and start loading things into the cart to try to get people on my list some Christmas presents, especially for my kids. Now, I don’t know exactly why this is a recurring nightmare for me, but when I get really stressed, this is something that I often dream.

And it’s funny, but it also expresses that I feel like so many of you do, and the holidays can be unbelievably stressful, and we dread them for many different reasons.

So let's talk about some statistics. We mentioned that 80% of millennial moms are feeling overwhelmed by the mental load. Sixty-five percent reported feeling pressured. And twice as many moms as dads feel the load. They feel stressed about the shopping, the family gatherings, the finances, keeping everybody healthy, and this kind of really weird ethereal expectation to create a magical Christmas—to build perfect memories. In fact, a study from the American Heart Association found that 79% of people overlook their health, and more than a quarter of moms say that it takes a month or more to recover from their holiday stress. Okay, this is bleak. This is no bueno.

We do not want this. So there are basically three reasons why you would feel stressed about the holidays—why you would be dreading them. And we’re going to go through each one of these, and as I’m talking about them, I want you to self-identify. You might feel stressed about all three. You might just identify with one or the other.

And for each one, I’m going to give you a tool that you can use to manage that specific stressor. The first one is setting unrealistic expectations. We're going to talk about this more in a minute. You can just imagine what it is, but I'm going to take you through a little activity that's going to help you.

This is a big reason that we feel unhappy going into the holidays—because we think we have to show up for everybody else, and we have to make everything magical and perfect. We have these super high expectations, and I think we know deep down inside that we're just never going to meet those expectations, but we don't really know what to do about that.

The second reason that you would feel stressed at the holidays is that you feel responsible for everything, and the pressure is immense. You feel like it's all up to you. You are going to be the one that everyone’s finger is pointing at if Christmas isn't perfect. And so you feel really just dreading not making it perfect and someone complaining, and you giving your all and then it not being enough for somebody.

And the third reason why you might dread the holidays is that you're just worried. You're worried about the money, the gifts, the parties, seeing people that you don't want to see, helping everybody get along. These are all big reasons to dread the holidays, even though it's supposed to be this wonderful, beautiful time. And it can be.

Okay, so let's talk first about these unrealistic expectations. When I was a little girl—I can't remember exactly how old I was—but I wanted an Easy-Bake Oven so badly. I begged and begged and begged for this Easy-Bake Oven. And literally the only thing I remember about that Christmas is that I got an Easy-Bake Oven.

The ingredients came in these little box sets, and the dish was just this tiny little thing, and you would mix it up with water. It was basically just sugar and flour, I'm sure. And there were a couple different flavors, I think. You mixed them up, poured them in the little pan, and put them in your little oven. And I think I baked all of them on Christmas Day, and we ate them all up, and it was great. Frankly, I think I got a replenishment of those once or twice. I don’t even know how much I used the Easy-Bake Oven, but I got my Easy-Bake Oven and it was great.

Another year, I really, really wanted a little gumball dispenser. I wanted my own gumball machine. I mean, you just think if you could eat all the gumballs you ever wanted to eat.

And of course, I also remember we had a tradition that I carried into my family and now we're still doing it: we would get robes and towels and other things from around the house, and we would read from the Bible and act out the Nativity story. And as soon as we got video cameras—when those started to be a thing, because we didn’t have one when I was really young—and then we did. And we would videotape it. And now, of course, today we can record it and watch it immediately and laugh at ourselves and have a good time.

I remember dinners with family. I remember putting up the tree. Our tradition was to go get a real tree. I loved picking it out. We sometimes strung popcorn. We sometimes put on icicles. Just really fun times. I remember the Christmas music playing. Every year we watched Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. And being out of school and being able to sleep in—those are all my memories of Christmas.

And so, when you're trying to deal with the stress and the overwhelm and the dread of unmet or unrealistic expectations, I want you to do this. I want you to take a minute—you can do this right now—and I want you to do what I just did. I want you to think about your favorite gifts that you received as a child, your favorite activities that you did with your family, and the time that you spent with loved ones.

And my guess is that your experience is going to be pretty similar to mine. You're not going to remember every Christmas, and you're not going to remember most of the gifts that you received. There's just a feeling of music playing, lights going up, being out of school, being with your family, and looking forward to things—maybe a Christmas party that you always had. And you know what? It's so important to remember: it wasn't complicated.

You probably don't remember very many details. You probably remember the feelings—a handful of key memories, the time together, the way that you felt, and a few gifts.

And the reason this matters so much is because we as moms are really just trying to make something special for our families. Now, the parties are fun, the extended family dinners are fun, and sometimes we have to host those and it's a bit of work. But really, it's just that we want our children to have a good experience.

Frankly, there were plenty of Christmases when my kids were really little that they loved the boxes the toys came in. They would make them into forts, color on them, and play hide and seek in them. Small children especially are easy to please. And maybe you have teenagers and it's more complicated—I get it. But the point here being: you're just trying to please a few people. You're trying to give them traditions and memorable experiences, and it can be simple.

You want to have a happy Christmas. You want your children and your husband to have a happy Christmas, and that's really all that matters. And it's not complicated. They're not going to remember most of the gifts that they got, and they're not going to remember most of the things that you do. They're going to remember you being with them. They're going to remember a good feeling in the home. They're going to remember the smells. They're going to remember baking with you, cooking Christmas dinner with you. They're going to remember laughing. They're going to remember putting up the tree and putting the lights on it. They're going to remember little movies that you watch or other little traditions that you have. That's it.

And frankly, you can pull that off in a pretty short period of time. You can get each child a few simple things—maybe one thing that they really, really want. You can put on some simple traditions the day of. You can bake some cookies one or two nights and carol at the neighbor’s home. It can be so simple. It does not have to be complicated.

And every time you start to overcomplicate it and you think that the décor has to be perfect and the food has to be perfect and you have to make everybody happy and solve all the problems, I want you to remember your own childhood. Think about what you remember, try to pass that on to your children, keep it very simple, and remember that all of that is enough.

Okay, now what do you do if you're feeling responsible for everything? You're dreading Christmas because you feel responsible—like you have to do it all. What you're going to remember is that you can’t, and that no one expects you to. And if they expect you to, you can kindly tell them they're wrong.

You're not responsible for everything. I think if you’ll remember your own childhood experience—and you’ll take this next tip that I'm going to give you—it’s going to help you be more centered and see everything in a more balanced way. Because one of the things that we do is we have unrealistic expectations, and then we think we're responsible for all of the expectations, and then we don't take care of ourselves.

And so we're going to reverse that this Christmas—this holiday season. We're going to start, we're going to lead, by having simpler, clearer expectations that are more realistic and that match the kinds of memories you have from your childhood that you want to pass on to your children. And then we're going to take care of ourselves so that when we're tempted to feel responsible for everything, to fix it and make it better for everyone, we don't stress out, we don't get overwhelmed, and we don't start crying or yelling—because we are taking care of ourselves.

The American Psychological Association said that holiday stress has a particular impact on women. Moms take charge of many of the holiday celebrations, particularly the tasks related to preparing meals and decorating the home.

And what we want to remember is that if we can show up every day with energy and optimism—if we can be in a good mood and happy and positive—it will make all the difference for us and our families. And I'm going to give you a really simple tool to do that. I'm going to ask you to set aside 10 minutes a day. Now, it would be better if you would do an hour, but you can do this activity in 10 minutes. If you will do it every day, what that will do is—if you’ll start your day out by doing this thing I'm going to ask you to do for 10 minutes—it’s going to set a new tone.

And you are going to be taking care of yourself, which is going to recenter you, and you are going to be making connections and working on gratitude and all these things so that when you come out of your room and it’s time to start working on Christmas, you are going to be in a better place. And when you're in a better place, everything is going to go better.

You're going to remember your realistic expectations, and you're going to stop taking responsibility for everything because you are going to take care of you first. So I want you to go get this app, and it's called Miracle Morning. When you open it up, it's free. It's going to look like this. For those of you watching on YouTube, you can see that it says “Good Miracle Morning,” and you can set it to wake you up.

There are six activities you're going to do every day, and you can click off that you've done them. The first one is silence. That is some kind of spiritual connection. It is prayer or quiet or meditation—connection with the divine. Now, for Christians, this is going to be a meaningful prayer, but it’s going to be some way that you just sit with yourself and breathe and be quiet.

The next one is what they call affirmations. In the MDM Academy, we call these truth statements, where you're going to remember your realistic expectations, the memories you're trying to build for your children. Remind yourself that you can't do it all and you don't want to, and you're not going to, and it’s going to be enough for you to give your family a beautiful day, a beautiful experience.

You can write these right in the app and just read them for yourself, or they have generic ones you can use. You’ll just say or read a couple little truth statements for yourself—they call them affirmations. And then you're going to visualize. You're going to sit with yourself and calmly think about how you want this holiday season to look.

You can think about specific events. You can think about Christmas morning. You can see yourself feeling the way that you want to feel. You can imagine yourself having a hard conversation, or imagine yourself enjoying the Christmas holiday. And then you're going to exercise in some fashion.

Then you're going to read something that lifts you, and then you're going to scribe—you’re going to write what you're grateful for and just journal for a few minutes. And the reason I said you can do this in 10 minutes is because technically you can actually do it in six minutes. You can do each of these for one minute.

You can do silence for a minute, affirmations for a minute, visualize for a minute, exercise for a minute, read for a minute, and scribe for a minute—one minute each—and you'd be done in six minutes. Or you can take a little more time with each of these. You take five or ten minutes each, and sure enough, you've spent an hour and you're really renewed.

You have imagined the kind of holiday season that you want to have. You have told yourself the truth about who you are and what you're creating for your family. You've done some stretching or walked around the block or gotten on the treadmill for 10 minutes and moved your body and gotten your energy up and your blood flowing.

You've read something that inspires you. This can be scripture, but it can just be any good book that elevates your soul and teaches you truth and makes you feel good. And then you're going to write something—a few things that you're grateful for, journal about why this day is going to be great, why you're happy to be alive, why you feel grateful for this holiday season, why it's going to be a wonderful one.

So that's how you're going to stop being responsible for everything and everyone all the time—because you are going to prepare yourself every morning for a wonderful day by using that Miracle Morning app. And we will have a link for that in the description for you. Just literally take 10 minutes, go into a quiet room, tell everyone to leave you alone, get up early, whatever you have to do. Do it before you go to bed for the next day—whatever works.

And I promise it will make a huge difference. Now the last thing that we need to manage in dreading the holidays is feeling worried.

I worry about all the things, obviously, because I have recurring nightmares about that. And there have been plenty of years when I was really worried about the finances and I thought that it had to be perfect, and I thought I had to buy my kids all the perfect gifts and all this kind of thing. And you know what?

Most of the time, I could manage to get all of my kids at least one thing that they genuinely wanted. I mean, sometimes it can just be some fish in a fishbowl, and that’s like 15 dollars. It can be something really, really simple that would be meaningful for them—something they can look forward to from their Christmas list.

So I want to give you one more tool that's going to help you to not worry, because when we remember that worrying is simply projecting into the future something that we don't want to have happen—it’s assuming the worst, it’s expecting the worst—and it's not helpful because it's really focused on fears. Worries are just fears of future events that haven't even happened, that we're bringing into our present moment. And so we’re letting the future poison the present—the future that hasn’t even happened poison the present.

And we do not want to do that. We do not want to let the future poison the present. So what we're going to do instead is we're going to turn every worry into an empowering question. I've talked about this on the podcast before, and in the notes below in the description, I'm going to give you a link to a little mini training.

It's just a little audio—just a few minutes—and then a little worksheet. It's not going to take you very much time, but it will walk you in more detail through how to use empowering questions in your everyday life and how to use them to stop the worries. So make sure you go grab that mini training, but I'll give you just a glimpse into what it is and why it's so incredibly helpful.

So I learned this concept from a book called The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class by Keith Cameron Smith. And this is the last distinction. It's the number one way, he says, that the wealthy think differently than other people, and it's the simple idea that they ask themselves empowering questions. But he taught me something really, really important about something Jesus taught.

We know He said over and over again, “Ask and you shall receive.” But what Keith Cameron Smith helped me understand is that because our brains are brilliant problem-solving machines, every time we ask ourselves a question, our mind wants to solve the problem. So it gets to work solving the problem—finding the answers to our questions.

So when we ask, we literally always receive. And when we start to worry, and we start to think about future events that we don’t want to have happen, and then that turns into negative thoughts—and we stew and let that ruminate in our minds—we become more negative, more fearful, more upset. And now suddenly we're taking things out on people before anything has ever even happened.

Empowering questions are really simple. They're questions that ask you what you can do. Disempowering questions ask you what you can't do. Empowering questions make you feel good; disempowering questions make you feel bad.

So, if you’re worrying about something—like maybe you're going to see Uncle Bob and he was really rude to you when you were younger, or maybe somebody betrayed you and you have to have Christmas dinner with them, or whatever the case might be—and you’re just dreading this thing that's going to happen over the holidays, and you're worrying and worrying about it, you're not changing it by worrying about it. And if it's making you feel bad and it's focusing on what you can't control, then you know it's a worry and you need to stop.

So how do you stop? You stop by turning the worry into an empowering question.

Okay? So if it's Uncle Bob and I'm going to see him at this family get-together, then you can start to ask yourself empowering questions about that situation.

There are all sorts of them. You could say to yourself, “What could I say to him when I see him?” “How can I have a conversation that's civil?” You could ask, “How can I see the good in him and reflect that?” You can ask, “How can I forgive him and have better feelings toward him?”

You can ask yourself, “How can I have the people around me, who love me, help and support me in this situation that I'm in with Uncle Bob?”

And as you sit on these empowering questions—questions that are about what you can control, not what anybody else is going to do—your brilliant mind will start to come up with solutions.

And you don't need to worry that the minute you ask the question you need to have an answer. Your brilliant mind will come up with an answer. And this puts you right back into a faithful, creator frame of reference. This gets you right back into a place where you are in the driver’s seat. You can make it be what it needs to be. And if the answer to the question is “I can’t go see Uncle Bob,” then you make provisions for that to be the case.

But this is really what's going to make a huge difference for you. As a man thinketh, so is he. We read in the Bible that what you focus on is going to be your result, and what you practice is what you get better at.

If you practice worrying, you will get better at it. If you practice turning your worries into empowering questions that your brilliant mind will solve, then you will get better at that. And because it's focused on what you can do, and because the question makes you feel good—because you feel powerful and in control and you're focused on solutions and not problems—well then, now you're practicing being a more optimistic individual who's showing up with more positivity for yourself and the people around you.

And all of that is good. All of that is what we want, especially at the holidays. We want joyful, happy memories. And you know, your kids hear you and they feel your vibe. They feel your energy. They feel when you're stressed or negative or overwhelmed. And we’re doing that, moms—we’re doing that to ourselves with our worries, our unrealistic expectations, and feeling responsible for all the things.

And it just doesn't have to be that way.

So please remember, this is meant to be a happy time. For Christians, this is a celebration that the Savior was born. For others, it's a time to celebrate family and love. It's a time to remember each other by giving gifts. It's a time to gather, to eat yummy food, to talk, to laugh, to play games, and to make memories.

And so try to focus on these three tools that I’ve given you. Let's remember to think back on our own childhood and keep the experiences for our children simple and fun and uplifting, because it doesn't have to be elaborate. They don't care about all the decorations. They don't care about all the fancy stuff. And they are the ones that really matter the most to us. They are the ones we’re trying to do this for. So bring those traditions forward.

Remember to do your Miracle Morning practice every morning. Make sure you do those five—he calls them SAVERS. Make sure you take time for prayer, visualization, truth statements, gratitude, and a little bit of movement—all of those things that will lift you up and help you show up more optimistically.

And then please, in the description, click on the link and grab your mini training. Listen to the little audio as many times as you need to. It will lift you up. It will inspire you. It will remind you how you can use empowering questions. And use the worksheet—carry it around with you and use it ongoing. Print it off as many times as you want to help you become someone who knows better how to manage her mom guilt, stop worrying, and be optimistic instead.

Now, I'm really excited for next week's episode. We are going to carry this theme into next week, and we're going to finish out the year by diving a little deeper into managing holiday stress by talking about shame and the role that shame can play in the relationship—in the way we're interacting, in shaming, when we shame ourselves and when other people shame us. It won't be real long, but it'll definitely be something that will help us get re-centered on taking proper care of ourselves through the holidays, seeing things more clearly, and calling shame out properly—and not letting ourselves go down that rabbit hole so that we can have a better holiday season.

And then we will take a couple of weeks off, and I'm so excited for the new year. I have so many guests I'm reaching out to that I'm super excited to bring onto the show. We have some new themes and some really great content that we are gearing up to share with you. It's going to be an incredible year.

As you may already know, we have brought back our MDM Celebration, which is happening next fall. That's going to be Mothers of Creation. That theme—we’ve all been waiting for it. It's going to be phenomenal. And so 2026 is going to be an incredible year for The Mission-Driven Mom and the Academy with our new workshops we talked about recently, with the Celebration coming up, and all of that good stuff.

But stay tuned next week as we spend some time on shame and staying out of that over the holiday season. And if this has been helpful for you, please pass it along. Please leave a review. Subscribe. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next time.

Get Your FREE Chapters in Audio format from The Mission Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World: https://www.themissiondrivenmom.com/

Audrey examines Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and challenges the cultural myth that the sexual revolution and modern feminism have been unqualified goods. Drawing on Perry, Leonard Sachs, Ludwig von Mises, and Alexis de Tocqueville, she argues that treating sex as a casual leisure activity and insisting that men and women are “the same” has largely benefited a small group of predatory men while deeply harming women, children, and families.

The episode highlights strong scientific evidence that men and women are biologically and psychologically different, and that equality does not mean sameness. When society tears down moral “fences” around sex—chastity, modesty, marriage, and clear gender norms—women lose protection, family life breaks down, and freedom itself erodes. Audrey contrasts today’s confusion with Tocqueville’s description of early American women: educated, virtuous, respected, protected, and vital to the nation’s strength.

Ultimately, Audrey calls mothers to push back against the lies of the sexual revolution, to teach their children to be ladies and gentlemen, to honor traditional sexual morals, and to defend marriage and family as the best system for taming male impulses, safeguarding women and children, and rebuilding a healthy, free society.

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Transcript (AI Generated)

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission-Driven Life, founder of The Mission-Driven Mom. Make sure and go to themissiondrivenmom.com and get your three free chapters of my book The Mission-Driven Life: Discover and Fulfill Your Unique Contribution to the World, because that will give you an overview of everything that we do here and how you can get started on your own mission-driven journey.

Today, we're going to spend a few minutes with The Case Against the Sexual Revolution and Louise Perry. It is kind of, in our culture, an undisputed fact that the sexual revolution and the feminist movement were 100% good—that they changed the world for the better, that women are so liberated and so much better off.

But lately, in the last two or three years, there have been quite a few books coming out by scholars and researchers and authors that are pushing back against that narrative. We are 60 years in—60, 70 years in—and now we have an opportunity to stand up and look around at the world that the sexual revolution and the feminist movement gave us.

And I am pushing back on that as well with these authors. My plan is, in the coming year, to talk to more of these authors, to write more about this, and to make some of these tools and ideas and truths available to all of us as mothers and women, because it is imperative that we understand all of the damage that the sexual revolution and the feminist movement did.

And, you know, you're just not allowed to say that in today's world. You're just not allowed to say that it wasn't all beautiful and perfect and roses from these movements. But it definitely was not. We are experiencing the damage done. So, we're going to touch on a few things today. I'll take you into this book and a few other books that I thought of today just to talk around this idea for a few minutes.

This book is, as you can guess, Louise Perry's research on some of the damage that the sexual revolution has done. Now, she starts out the book by talking about Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner. And what you might not know is that they’re pretty intimately connected. Marilyn Monroe was at a point of desperation.

She was trying to be a model, and she went and had some nude photos done. She wasn’t paid very much money, and this photographer promised her that they wouldn’t be published—blah, blah, blah—all the lies that people say. And a few years later, when she had quite a bit more fame, Hugh Hefner decided that he was going to launch Playboy magazine, and he was going to launch it with a centerfold of Marilyn Monroe.

The man who had taken the photos of Marilyn promised her that she would barely be recognizable, but she’s definitely recognizable in the photos. And because she was famous by this point, it definitely launched Playboy, and it was successful from that point on. Now, if you know very much about Marilyn Monroe, you probably know that she had a very troubled childhood.

She spent some time in foster care. She didn’t really have a sense of self, and I don’t know at what point she was abused, but she was definitely abused by men. And then Louise says this: today’s female porn performers are far more likely than their peers to have been sexually abused as children, to have been in foster care, and to have been victims of domestic violence as adults.

All misfortunes Monroe suffered too. “When it all goes horribly wrong, as it usually does, the public labels these once-desired women crazy and moves on. There is never a reckoning with what sexual liberation does to those who follow its directives most obediently.” And I would say, if I had to give you in a nutshell what Louise Perry is saying in this book, it's something like this: even though there are a few things we might be able to thank the sexual revolution or the feminist movement for, there’s a lot of damage that has been done.

And it’s moved us away from meaningful sexual interactions. It’s moved us away from family relationships and bonds and commitments. And male predators have actually been the biggest winners. It’s actually women who have suffered at the hands of the small percentage of men who have a tendency toward violence.

So, I want to read you a few things that Louise says early on in the book in regard to these ideas. She says that she used to be quite liberal in her frame of reference, and she says about the book—this is really fascinating—she says, “The sexual revolution of the 1960s stuck, and its ideology is now the ideological sea we swim in, so normalized that we can hardly see it for what it is.” And so, she’s trying to bring to the surface fundamental ideas and assumptions from the sexual revolution and ask—ask ourselves—why is that not okay? How did that play out in the real world? Why was that a bad idea?

In fact, I’ll tell you really quickly before we dive into it, these are the chapter headings, which I think will compel you to maybe go out and get this book and read some of it for yourself:

Chapter 1: Sex Must Be Taken Seriously
Chapter 2: Men and Women Are Different
Chapter 3: Some Desires Are Bad
Chapter 4: Loveless Sex Is Not Empowering
Chapter 5: Consent Is Not Enough
Chapter 6: Violence Is Not Love
Chapter 7: People Are Not Products
Chapter 8: Marriage Is Good
Conclusion: Listen to Your Mother

And I am going to just float around some of the beginning chapters of this book and give you some other frame of reference from some other thinkers. I’m just going to give you some other quotes and ideas from other authors that I thought of while I was reading this and preparing this for you, just to give you some jumping-off places to start to think differently about the sexual revolution and where it has led us.

For many of you, you’re God-fearing, conservative women. You already think it’s a bunch of nonsense or it hasn’t done good things, but it’s often so difficult to communicate why—what it is that’s actually wrong, what it is that you’re actually upset about—and that’s what books like this can do for you.

Okay? So she goes into, “I used to follow this narrative and think it was a good idea. I used to be quite liberal,” and she says, to be upfront, this book is not an attempt to reckon with some of the changes from the sexual revolution. She says, “I want to avoid the accounts typically offered by liberals addicted to a narrative of progress and conservatives addicted to a narrative of decline.”

She wants to try to land somewhere in the middle, but with the understanding that she has now become far more conservative in her thinking, the more research she has done. She says, “I’m writing in a more deliberate and focused way against a liberal narrative of sexual liberation, which I think is not only wrong but also harmful.

“My complaint is focused more against liberals than against conservatives for a very personal reason: I used to believe the liberal narrative.” And then she goes on, “I held the same political views as most millennial urban graduates. In other words, I conformed to the beliefs of my class, including liberal feminist ideas about porn, BDSM, hookup culture, evolutionary psychology, sex trading, and so on.

“I let go of these beliefs because of my own life experiences, including a period immediately after university spent working at a rape crisis center.” She says, “If the old quip tells us that a conservative is just a liberal who has been mugged by reality, then I suppose, at least in my case, that a post-liberal feminist is just a liberal feminist.”

Okay? So that’s her position. That’s where she’s coming from, and I’m going to give you some fundamental ideas about what else she’s trying to do with this book. Now, one of the things that's happened in our culture—and in fact Jacques Barzun talks about this in his big, fat book on the history of the West—he talks about how there’s a handful of key ideas that we have glommed onto. We’ve made them our core values, and for 500 years since the 1500s, we’ve marched forward with those, and we get more and more eccentric, I guess, with these ideas, with these values over time. And we lean into them more and more and more, to the point of tilting in the other direction.

And one of the points that she makes is that freedom is only good when it’s balanced with other values and first principles. What’s happened with this ideology of sexual liberation is that it hasn’t been balanced with other values. She says, “In this book, I’m going to ask and seek to answer some questions about freedom that liberal feminism can’t or won’t answer.”

Here are some of the questions: Why do so many women desire a kind of sexual freedom that so obviously serves male interests? What if our bodies and minds aren’t as malleable as we might like to think? What do we lose when we prioritize freedom above all else? And above all, how should we act given all of this?

And her argument is that we aren’t as malleable as we think we are—that we’re hardwired in some very concrete and important ways that we’re ignoring.

One of the big ideas from the sexual revolution that is ruining people, ruining relationships, and ruining our culture is that sex is just a leisure activity. Just a leisure activity. That’s so important to understand, because when you pair that idea with the idea of unlimited, unbridled personal freedom, then you get what we’re experiencing today.

She says this suits the likes of Hefner very nicely, since playboys like him have a lot to gain from this new sexual culture. It is in their interest to push a particularly radical idea about sex that has come out of the sexual revolution and has proved remarkably influential despite its harms—that sex is nothing more than a leisure activity. That it’s not special, that it’s not unique, that it doesn’t mean anything, that we should be able to just engage in that activity and walk away with no emotions and no attachments and no baggage.

It’s a big fat lie, and it’s one of the reasons why sex has now become commoditized, and it is doing so much harm to so many people. In fact, she talks about how this led to the #MeToo movement, because men were given more and more access to women as women offered their bodies because they felt like they had to—because that was the new culture.

She says the story of the sexual revolution isn’t the story of women freed from the burdens of chastity and motherhood—although it is that. It is also a story of the triumph of the playboy, a figure who is too often both forgotten and forgiven despite his central role in this still-recent history. And she talks about how Marilyn Monroe died young and was shamed and all of the things, and then Hugh Hefner lived to a ripe old age in his wealth and didn’t pay nearly as big a price.

She goes on to say, “Everyone knows that sex is not the same thing as making coffee. And when an ideology of sexual disenchantment demands that we pretend otherwise, the result can be a distressing form of cognitive dissonance.”

So a big reason why this kind of thing is happening is our new idea about the equality of the sexes. And one of the things that a lot of really important philosophers and thinkers have tried to point out, but which hasn’t made it into the mainstream narrative, is simply this: equality is not sameness. We can be equal without being the same—without wearing the same clothes, doing the same jobs, thinking the same things, and especially not being the same sexually.

And there's a lot of evidence around that being the case. I pulled out this book Why Gender Matters. I thought I'd talk to you for just a minute about some of the things that Leonard Sax has to say. He’s an MD and a PhD. He’s absolutely brilliant, and he has written an older book and a newer book—Why Gender Matters. I’ve had both copies. They cover a little bit different things, both very good and valuable. But he has a few things to say about his story about why he got into this. It was because he was working with children, and parents kept being told to do gender-neutral parenting and to raise their children the same. And yet it wasn’t working, and they couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working.

So here are a couple of the things that he has to say about how biologically different we really are. He says, “After waiting a few years for somebody else to write a book about girls and boys based on actual scientific research, I finally decided to write one myself. But I made myself a promise: every time I make any statement about how girls and boys are different, I also state the evidence on which my statement is based. Every statement I make about sex differences will be supported by good science published in peer-reviewed journals.” And he does that. He goes through all of these biological differences—so many. And the combination of those factors and other biological factors also leads to very different priorities and very different approaches and attitudes about sexual behavior as well.

He goes on: “There’s more at stake than the old question of nature versus nurture. The failure to recognize and respect sex differences in child development has done substantial harm over the past 30 years.” Such was his claim throughout this book. And this first one was written in 2005, and so it had been, you know, since the eighties. And his big focus is the damage that ignoring sex differences was doing in education—not the sexual act, but the genders, as we call them today. But the sexes, that we really are very different—that our gender does matter, that we need to be treated differently and educated differently and thought about differently.

And the mindset of, in terms of the sexual revolution—on what Louise Perry is talking about—the mindset that sex is just a leisure activity that doesn’t mean anything, and that everybody’s exactly the same and there are no differences. In fact, she goes back to Rousseau and other philosophers before him that talk about the socialization argument, that that’s really ingrained. And Leonard Sax says he was indoctrinated with that at school as well. He was taught the John Money story as evidence that the genders were the same and you could flip-flop them in childhood and they would come out okay. And of course, we know how that story played out with John Money and the boys and their later suicides and all of that nonsense.

So he goes on to talk about the first kind of key for him—hearing. The boys’ and girls’ hearing was very different. And he cites this study. It was a study done with newborn babies on the day they were born—102 of them. They were videotaped, and their eye motions were analyzed by researchers who didn’t know the sex of the baby.

The boy babies were much more interested in the mobile than in the young woman’s face. The girl babies were more likely to look at the face. The differences were large. The boys were twice as likely to prefer the mobile. The researchers concluded that they had proven “beyond reasonable doubt” that sex differences in social interest “are in part biological in origin.”

Surprise, surprise. There’s the anatomy of the eye, there’s the anatomy of the ear. There’s a lot of research around the brain and very large differences in the brain. We’re not talking about small differences between the sexes with lots of overlap. We’re talking about large differences between the sexes with no overlap at all.

In this particular case, he’s talking about the eye. Every male animal had a thicker retina than any female retina due to the males having more M cells. So then he says here, talking also about the eye, the P cells send information, the M cells send their information via different pathways, etc., etc.—a region that is specialized for analysis of spatial relationships and object motion. And guess what? Every step in each pathway from the retina to the cerebral cortex is different in females and males.

So it isn’t just that they have more of this or that. Every single step of the way—just in analyzing the eye—it’s different. It’s different with smell, it’s different with speaking, with language that’s used, when it’s used, how it’s developed. And even in adults we know there are large differences between communication styles and emotional awareness and all these kinds of things that are just incredibly hardwired.

And so a big part of what Louise Perry is saying here is that we have to get honest about the fact that men and women are very different. And because they're different, their mindsets, their approaches, their attitudes about sex are different. And what’s happening with our current attitude is that the men are winning.

The men are getting more of what they want, and the women are the biggest losers. The women want intimacy. They want connection. They want commitment. And they want families—as they always have. And the sexual revolution has given them far less of any of that. And some women have been so indoctrinated that they think that maybe they don’t want that, and then they realize later in life that they do, and then it feels like it’s too late or they’ve missed out, etc., etc.

I have a book somewhere around here called What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us, and she makes the same case as well—that she was indoctrinated with the feminist movement ideological tenets and concepts. And she and other women her age realized too late that they actually wanted what was taken from them through the feminist movement.

She says the blank-slate view—that socialization is everything, that all that matters is what society tells us, that we’re only playing roles as this Judith Butler idea, that it’s all… what’s the word she uses… like it’s all play-acting. We’re all just taking on the identity of a gender and playing it out. None of its innate. None of it is biological. And so because that’s the case, we can flip-flop between without much interruption or struggle, and society should just adapt to that, and none of this other stuff matters.

And she says the blank-slate view gives ultimate authority to society in molding the human character for good or ill. But the truth is many things are very baked in, and we know this to be the case from science. And this is what I think really frustrates me the most—that those who claim to be so analytical and scientifically based throw out the science. They pretend like science is supporting them in these new worldviews and ideologies, and it’s just not.

It’s just a different belief system. It’s just a different worldview, which we talk a lot about in the Academy. It’s just a different belief system. And the mindset that we’re completely the same, that sex is just a leisure activity and has no meaning and no emotional or psychological consequences, has basically opened the door to men who don’t want to and aren’t willing to suppress their impulses. That’s really the consequence that we’re looking at in today’s world.

Perry says there is a more credible way of understanding the world, but it is one that offers much less scope for human perfectibility, and so it’s much less appealing to utopians. So people that are—and this of course reminded me of A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell and the whole concept that we see the world broadly through one of these two lenses.

One is that it’s all socialization and we can perfect the human race, and this is kind of the post-humanist movement. And then the other one says we’re hardwired, there are some things we can’t change, we should go with many of the traditions and things that have gone on before because they work for the human race.

Now, you don’t have to have a certain God frame of reference for either of those. Louise Perry talks a lot about evolution. Sounds like that’s her frame of reference, but of course I believe a lot of what she’s saying. One of the people that I thought about when I was thinking about all of these concepts was Ludwig von Mises, who is one of the founders of the Austrian School of Economics. That’s his Human Action book, which is basically an approach to economics that says we’re going to look at human behavior instead of numbers to start, because human behavior is actually what creates an economy, and it’s organic and it grows up on its own. And if we understand laws of human action—we talk a lot here at The Mission Driven Mom about laws of human behavior, laws of nature, the ideal way of being, the first principles we should follow.

Mises talks about the laws of human action—the way people do behave, the way they make decisions. Also really, really helpful. We get into that in Level 3. The point is, one of the things that Perry goes on to say as she gets into the next chapter—and I want to find this section to read to you—she says she first came across a book called A Natural History of Rape by Randy Thornhill and Craig T. Palmer, who had done extensive research to try to explain rape from an evolutionary perspective. And she said, “When I first came across the book, I read it compulsively all in one sitting and was left by the end feeling both disconsolate and oddly satisfied.

“I was working at the time in a rape crisis center. My job was to work one-on-one with women and girls who had been raped, but I also had a teaching role, training volunteers for our helpline and going into schools to teach consent workshops. The ideology that I was expected to teach lent heavily on a very particular academic model of rape, and over time I had developed doubts about the model.”

So again, she has this really unique history with the kinds of things that she’s done and the kinds of spaces that she’s been in. And basically, the idea that she was taught and that she was supposed to teach at this rape crisis center was Susan Brownmiller’s book Against Our Will—the claim that rape has historically more often been conceptualized as a property crime committed against a woman’s male kin rather than a crime committed against the woman herself. Basically, the idea that we have to end the patriarchy and then rape will go away. And she goes on to combat that, to give a bunch of studies to basically show that almost all sex crime is male, that almost all pornography consumption is male, that they have a different sex drive, that they have different sexual tastes, and that they are the ones who are driving those things in the culture—again, like the Hugh Hefner example of the playboy who gets his way.

And the problem is that we’ve brought down the guardrails, and so at this point the only guardrail that we have in our culture is a man’s self-discipline. If he really wants to take advantage of a woman, then he just can, unless he stops himself. And so the only thing between him and this woman getting in trouble are him controlling himself, and that’s just not a good way to go.

Of course, she quotes Chesterton’s fence, which I think I’ve quoted on this podcast before, which is the basic idea that if you’re going down a country road and you come across a fence and you want to get through to the other side of the road because you like the countryside and you want to keep going, then you shouldn’t just dismantle the fence and drive on. You should stop long enough to ask yourself why the fence is there. And once you understand why the fence is there, and it’s a reason that’s no longer needed, then you can dismantle the fence. And this argument is used a lot when conservatives especially are combating progressive ideas, to say: stop and ask, why are the guardrails there?

Why is the fence there? Why do we have all this shame around premarital sex? Why are we discouraging people from getting into bed anytime they want? Why are we pretending like that’s okay? And let’s find out why the fence is there, why those guardrails are there. And one of the things that we said was, “Oh, the guardrails are only there because women can get pregnant.”

And with that lead idea, we just proceeded to take down the fence and drive into the utopia of perfect sexual fulfillment for everyone. And actually that’s not what’s happening. You know, all of these kinds of violent sexual crime are way up, and porn use is way up, and men are having a lot of negative consequences with that, and it’s affecting all sorts of marriages.

And marriage is down, and pregnancy is down, and birth rates are down, and yet 40% of children are born out of wedlock. And there’s only 20% of families where there’s a mother and a father and their biological children still in the home. And so there’s all this damage done culturally, and it’s breaking down the fabric of our society because we thought the only guardrail that matters is that women get pregnant.

And then when we gave them the pill, there were more unwanted pregnancies because everybody decided that was going to save them. And so they just engaged in all this behavior, and then we had to have laws to legalize abortion so that we could get rid of those unwanted pregnancies. And then came the dissolution of the family and marriage and all those consequences that are now doing so much damage to so many people, because we started on the premise of these lies about what sex is, what matters about it, and why the guardrails are there.

She says, “We see this play out in male and female sexual behavior. The research is clear. We know that men, on average, prefer to have more sex and with a larger number of partners, that sex buyers are almost exclusively male, that men watch a lot more porn than women do, and that the vast majority of women, if given the option, prefer a committed relationship to casual sex.

“Sexual fetishes are also much more commonly found in men than in women, and although the cause of this difference is not well understood, men’s greater average sociosexuality seems to be a factor. All in all, the evidence demonstrates that the acts that have become much more socially acceptable over the last 60 years are acts that men are much more likely to enjoy. It is a good time to be a fetishist, a sex buyer, porn user, playboy. It is the highly sociosexual who have done best out of sexual liberalism, and these people are overwhelmingly male.” She even talks about, in almost all sexual crimes, if the woman is involved, she almost always has a male partner—that she’s assisting a male that’s engaging in that act.

Now, I’m going to do something that’s going to be super socially unacceptable, something that people aren’t going to like. Well, let me do this first—I want to read you what Mises says about this whole idea, because she goes back to, “Well, let’s look at animals. Let’s see how animals behave,” and all that kind of stuff. But I don’t love that argument because we do see animals acting in ways that humans shouldn’t act. We are higher than the animals. We are better than the animals, and we shouldn’t be acting as the animals, even though as a very baseline maybe we compare and say we’re doing worse than the animals, but we have the potential to be better than, and even worse than, animals.

So this is what Mises says. He’s talking about human behavior, about mankind, about human action and human action principles—how we make the choices that we make, and then ultimately how those actions drive an economy. But just in terms of those fundamental first principles that guide us, I love what Mises says here.

“He who acts under an emotional impulse also acts. What distinguishes an emotional action from other actions is the valuation of input and output. Emotions disarrange valuations. Inflamed with passion, man sees the goal as more desirable and the price he has to pay for it as less burdensome than he would in cool deliberation. Men have never doubted that even in the state of emotion means and ends are pondered, and that it is possible to influence the outcome of this deliberation by rendering more costly the yielding to the passionate impulse. To punish criminal offenses committed in a state of emotional excitement or intoxication more mildly than other offenses is tantamount to encouraging such excesses.”

So the first point that he’s making is that when we get highly emotional and we act out in that state, we are less self-governed, and we make worse choices that have worse consequences, and that from a criminal standpoint, in our judicial systems and our penal systems, if we give lighter sentences to people who did it because they were emotional, we’re encouraging people to be emotional and make decisions emotionally.

He says, “We interpret animal behavior on the assumption that the animal yields to the impulse which prevails at the moment. As we observe that the animal feeds, cohabits and attacks other animals or men, we speak of its instincts of nourishment, of reproduction and of aggression. We assume that such instincts are innate and pre-emptively ask for satisfaction.”

So in other words, we have human beings, and they act on emotion, and that makes their actions less valuable for them and others. It makes them worse in every way. And if we compare our behavior to animals, we make exceptions for them because they have impulses, and we say, “Oh, well, that was their impulse. They had to do that.” And then this conclusion:

“But it is different with man”—or mankind or humankind. “Man is not a being who cannot help yielding to the impulse that most urgently asks for satisfaction. Man is a being capable of subduing his instincts, emotions and impulses. He can rationalize his behavior. He renounces the satisfaction of a burning impulse in order to satisfy other desires. He is not a puppet of his appetites.”

So even though we do sometimes make rash decisions based on passion, we don’t have to. We are above the animals because we have reason and logic and self-control. We don’t have to act according to our impulses. We can stop and think, and we can decide what’s best for us and for others and choose those things instead. “A man does not ravish every female that stirs his senses.” And yet more men ravish females that stir their senses than they used to, because we keep bringing the guardrails down, because our society tells women that they should want to have casual sex, that it will be enjoyable for them, that they should participate in it to get a man’s attention, that they have to do it to compete for the men that they would want to marry, that they have to give men what they want in order to try to get them to make a commitment so that eventually they can have marriage and family.

This does not mean women don’t have sexual impulses. It doesn’t mean that they don’t desire men, and it doesn’t mean sometimes that they don’t act rashly. But we know statistically, without a doubt, that even in the moment they often are second-guessing themselves, don’t want to continue with the action, and have way more regrets than men do when they engage in that behavior. It just isn’t how they’re made, and it’s not satisfying for them, and it degrades them. It hurts their confidence, destroys relationships—especially their relationship with themself.

So then he goes on: “He does not devour every piece of food that entices him. He does not knock down every fellow he would like to kill. He arranges his wishes and desires into a scale. He chooses. In short, he acts. What distinguishes man from beast is precisely that he adjusts his behavior deliberately. Man is the being that has inhibitions, that can master his impulses and desires, that has the power to suppress instinctive desires and impulses.”

So when you take a society and you say, “All the guardrails are down. Do whatever you want. Take this pill. If it doesn’t work, go get this abortion and you’ll be fine. You’ll be fine socially, emotionally, intellectually, spiritually—everything will be fine,” and that’s not what we find. It’s not what’s happening at all. And so clearly that’s not what can work.

Now, one of the things she talks about in chapter three is that some desires are bad. Obviously. But when, again, you strip it from its moral context, you take God out of the picture, you don’t have societal mores and structures and guardrails, then what is right and wrong in that instance?

And you can make almost anything right. You can justify almost anything in your mind. And one of the things that I wrote down about that whole thing is that the reason why unbridled sexual behavior is so damaging to society—aside from the millions of things that I’ve already mentioned and all the things that you can think of—is this simple truth.

And that is that society is made up of individuals, and individuals are harmed when they do something immoral, even when they do it alone, even when they do it with no one looking, even when no one ever finds out about it. Their character is damaged. They aren’t as confident, they aren’t as faithful, they aren’t as trustworthy, they aren’t as generous or kind, or all the things that you might want to say about someone who’s ignoring their conscience and engaging in behaviors.

Or even if their conscience is deadened and they think it’s okay, it’s not okay because it damages them. And when individuals are harmed through their own lack of self-control and deviation from their conscience or from truth—whether or not they know that truth—society is harmed, because society is nothing more than a collection of individuals and families.

And when individuals are damaged and families are damaged, society is damaged. And so this is why we have to push back on the sexual revolution. This is why we have to tell ourselves and other people more of the truth. And I am going to do something—I mentioned this a little bit earlier—I’m going to do something that’s going to sound socially unacceptable.

And that is, I’m going to pull out my Tocqueville. Okay. This is Democracy in America. This is Alexis de Tocqueville. He was French. He came to America to study the penal system in the early to mid-1800s. He went home, he wrote this big fat book, Democracy in America. France is in trouble. They’ve just come off their revolution and their time with the little guy that was in charge, Napoleon. And now they’re trying to remake their civilization. And Tocqueville is like, okay, well, what’s it like in America? How’s this democracy experiment working out?

And he goes through and catalogs—I mean, he is here for, I think, two years. He goes all over the country, he goes out in the sticks, he talks to people in their cabins. He gets a really good sense of what people are like in America, of what the culture is like, of how they interact and all of that kind of stuff. And he’s mostly praising. He’s also contrasting: this is how they do it in America, this is how we do it in France. And there’s this little section where he talks about women and the role of women in—now, this isn’t to do with slavery, this isn’t to do with Native Americans.

He’s talking about the Europeans that came to America that were leading in the society and how they’re interacting—the colonial people, just the average citizen in America. And I’m not going to speak to the fact that yes, minorities were taken way more advantage of and that needed to be handled and all that kind of stuff.

I’m just going to talk to what Tocqueville says, which I think may surprise you about how women were treated in America, because one of the points that Perry makes—and in fact, I’ll give you this.

Okay, so one of the points that she makes early on, which is also part of this whole discussion about what’s gone wrong in the sexual revolution, is that what the culture does is it demonizes the past in order to justify the present. She says, “Within living memory, we have witnessed a very sudden break with the norms of the past, and the necessity of this break is constantly justified in the liberal media through reference to the bad old days.” This kind of present-criticism is parodied beautifully in a 2020 TV adaptation of Huxley’s Brave New World, in which the Savage Lands—more like an Indian reservation in the novel—are reimagined as a theme park devoted to a 21st-century American decline.

Okay, so she goes on talking about how they talk about these Savage Lands, blah, blah, blah. And then she says, “This regime encourages the citizens of New London”—this is in the book—“to visit the Savage Land theme park because demonizing the past serves to justify the status quo. Highlighting the evils of the past also serves to distract from the evils of the present.”

So what we’ve done in our modern culture, in order to push this feminist movement and sexual revolution forward, is that there’s been this narrative that everything in the past was awful, nothing good was going on, and everything is so much better now. But what I’m going to read to you right now from Tocqueville points out the fact that it wasn’t all worse in the past and better in the present.

Okay, so this was originally published—1840. So that’s kind of the timeframe that we’re looking at. So he’s talking about women, and he came from France, and so he’s like, wow, things are so different in America in terms of how they treat their women.

So first of all, he talks about how it’s his opinion—and not just his, but a lot of other philosophers have said—that women really are the moral anchor in a family and in a civilization, and that in America, in this time, women were really that for their society, that they got a better education than pretty much anywhere in the world because most women were taught to read, which was just not even happening anywhere else.

He says, “Long before an American girl arrives at the marriageable age, her emancipation from maternal control begins. She has scarcely ceased to be a child when she already thinks for herself, speaks with freedom and acts on her own impulse. The great scene of the world is constantly open to her view; far from seeking to conceal it from her, it is every day disclosed more completely, and she is taught to survey it with firm and calm gaze. Thus, the vices and dangers of society are early revealed to her, and she sees them clearly. She views them without illusion and braves them without fear, for she is full of reliance on her own strength, and her confidence seems to be shared by all around her.” And he kind of beats that drum.

He talks often about how the women in America are incredibly educated and courageous. They’re trusted and respected by the men in their culture. He says, “As they could not prevent her virtue from being exposed to frequent danger, they determined that she should know how best to defend it, and more reliance was placed on the free vigor of her will than on safeguards which had been shaken or overthrown. Instead, then, of inculcating mistrust of herself, they constantly seek to enhance her confidence in her own strength of character. Far from hiding the corruptions of the world from her, they prefer that she should see them at once and train herself to shun them.”

This is just very different than what’s going on in France, where there’s all this overprotection of women. “Although the Americans are a very religious people, they do not rely on religion alone to defend the virtue of women; they seek to arm her reason also. In this respect, they have followed the same method as in several others. They first make vigorous efforts to cause individual independence to control itself, and they do not call in the aid of religion until they have reached the utmost limit of human strength.”

This is something—if you’ve read the Little House books, I can’t remember which one it’s in, maybe Little Town on the Prairie. There’s a Fourth of July celebration, and Laura Ingalls goes into town and hears the Declaration of Independence read, and it mingles in her mind. And she comes to understand at 14 or 15 or 16 years old, however old she was, that pretty soon she would be an adult, and no one was going to tell her what to do, that her parents were already letting go and letting her make her own choices.

And she says, “I’m going to have to basically make myself mind myself. I’m going to have to be a woman of virtue and self-discipline if I want to be free and have a happy life.” And she says specifically that virtue and freedom are so intimately connected, and you cannot have freedom unless you have self-discipline. They are two sides of the same coin. And that’s one of the reasons why private and public duty were so talked about in that day. It’s one of the reasons why there’s a breakdown socially in our day, because we think that unbridled freedom is what makes us free. It’s the same with the sexual revolution.

It’s just this fundamental principle that freedom must be disciplined. I love—one of my very favorite quotes is by Mortimer Adler, and he says, “Liberal education frees our minds by disciplining them.” And so this is why the sexual revolution isn’t working. Because we are not disciplining ourselves.

We have decided that anything goes, and we keep making more and more things legal. And what that has meant is that sexual acts have become a commodity, because people think they own their own body and what they do with their body doesn’t matter. And then they destroy their body, or they harm their body and their character with their behavior.

And that demeans our society overall, because every individual matters, and every individual character is part of the fabric of the cultural character. It also means that we’re telling ourselves that in this realm, as in others, we don’t have to have discipline, which is so fascinating to me, because we’ll still talk about how much discipline we should have as parents, or how much discipline we should have in professional sports, or how much discipline we should have in whatever area of life.

And we just keep wanting to take shortcuts, like all the people that are on pills, you know, to shortcut whatever thing they want to have happen in their life, instead of adhering to the principles of that thing in order to get what they want in the more permanent fix—the fix that gives them what they want while it builds their character.

So it’s, he says here, “I am aware that an education of this kind is not without danger. I’m sensible that it tends to invigorate the judgment at the expense of the imagination, and to make cold and virtuous women instead of affectionate wives and agreeable companions to man. Society may be more tranquil and better regulated, but domestic life has fewer charms. These, however, are secondary evils which may be braved for the sake of higher interests. At the stage at which we have now arrived, the choice is no longer left to us.” A democratic education—and this is an education for freedom. This is what we would call a classical liberal education, the traditional education that we used to have that has been stolen from us, that many of you moms that are listening have never had the opportunity to have.

And it is what made these women of the past so disciplined and virtuous and the upholders. Anyway. “Democratic education is indispensable to protect a woman from the dangers with which democratic institutions and manners surround them.”

So as freedom is increased, women need to be more and more virtuous. Okay, so then he goes on, talking about women in different ways, about how courageous they are.

And then he has a few things to say like this: “Although the travelers who have visited North America differ on many points, they all agree in remarking that morals are far more strict there than elsewhere. It is evident that on this point, the Americans are very superior to their progenitors, the English.”

So this morality undergirds the civilization. It makes for the incredible freedom, and if you go back and look at records, you can see that it corresponds with other elements of growth and success.

Okay, now I’m going to talk for just one minute before we finish up about how all of this plays into, going back to the beginning, about equality of the sexes. Because what we’ve done is try to eradicate self-discipline, eradicate virtue, pretend like personal character doesn’t matter, pretend like everything—like it’s not the case that every action we take is building the kind of person we’re becoming and that that doesn’t matter at all.

All of those things matter. And also that we’re different. We can be equal but different. And what we’re doing in our society—what the feminist movement has done, what the sexual revolution is doing—is trying to create equal and same. And what we had earlier in America was equal but different. And although that meant certain consequences for certain people, certain limitations of what they could do, they had incredible autonomy.

Basically what you find in earlier civilizations and in earlier America is almost complete autonomy in the private realm for women, where they ran the private sector almost without men interrupting or butting into their business. They ran the charities, they ran the bazaars, they helped give birth to the babies and put on the weddings, and they did a lot of educating at home.

They did a lot of the charitable work and the giving and all of that because they didn’t have to worry about the public sector, because the men ran the public sector. And I can see why women would want to be more involved in the public sector and why they would want to have more freedom in that way, be able to vote and whatnot. And I’m not saying that that is a bad thing. I’m just saying, let’s stop pretending like everything today is peachy keen and everything in the past was terrible. So I’m going to read you a couple things as we finish up here.

“There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make man and woman into beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties and grant to both the same rights. They would mix them in all things—their occupations, their pleasures, their business.” And isn’t that where we’ve arrived? Isn’t that what’s happening? Aren’t we trying to be equal and same? I mean, didn’t the feminist movement tell us that we should dress like men and act like men—even sexually—that we should do what they do and go where they go and be in the same positions that they’re in, and that every time something like that happens, we call it a triumph?

While, in the meantime, fewer and fewer babies are being born to a two-parent family and being cared for full-time by their mother. And that’s not always possible, and I’m not blaming anybody or calling anybody out. I’m just saying society is suffering by some of these changes. And so we have to be careful in how we talk about the past and how we talk about the present and the kind of solutions that we think we want. He goes on, “It may readily be conceived that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded.” Men don’t know who they are. Women don’t know who they are. We can’t even define what a woman is because we’ve made them the same. He says, “And from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women.”

Now he goes on to talk about how men and women have very strict divisions of labor, more so than a lot of other places. He says, “There are two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes and to make them keep pace with one another, but in two pathways that are always different. American women never manage the outward concerns of the family, or conduct a business, or take part in political life; nor are they, on the other hand, ever compelled to perform the rough labor of the fields or to make any of those laborious efforts which demand the exertion of physical strength. And no families are so poor as to form an exception to this rule.”

So even though there are limitations on the kinds of things women can do, they also are never forced to do any particular thing, especially anything that is a man’s role. And they also have complete freedom within the realm in which they’re stationed. They contribute economically to the family, they run the family, and they have a lot of autonomy. And he says, a lot of people look at this and they’re like, “Oh, isn’t that too bad?” And he says, “I never observed that the women of America consider conjugal authority as a fortunate usurpation of their rights, or that they thought themselves degraded by submitting to it.”

So his experience in America was that women felt respected. They felt loved. They felt taken care of as a general rule. They enjoyed the role that they held in the home and in the family, and they were happy to submit to good men who took good care of them. And what you find today—and this isn’t popular to say—is that a lot of women want to be stay-at-home moms, and a lot of women want to be taken care of.

There’s this new trend—in fact, someone was telling me that members of my family are engaging in this new trend of “stay-at-home girlfriend.” They also have the “trad wives.” All these kinds of things are looping back. So now he’s going to compare it to France. “It’s often been remarked that in Europe a certain degree of contempt lurks even in the flattery which men lavish upon women. Although a European frequently affects to be a slave of women”—so in France and in Europe, men will pretend like they worship women and they think women are all of that and they’re incredible—“but it may be seen that he never sincerely thinks her his equal.”

Now again, you have to take time periods, where they’re at in so many ways. In America in 1840, we were way ahead of the curve. Women were treated with way more respect, with way more equality, given way more education, way more frame in which to work and have autonomy than many, if not all, other places in the world. He says, “In the United States, men seldom compliment women”—so they don’t do this thing like in France where they’re always talking about how gorgeous they are and being flirty—“but they daily show how much they esteem them. They constantly display an entire confidence in the understanding of a wife and a profound respect for her freedom. They have decided that her mind is just as fitted as that of a man to discover the plain truth and her heart as firm to embrace it; and they have never sought to place her virtue, any more than his, under the shelter of prejudice, ignorance or fear.

“Americans rarely lavish women with these eager attentions which are commonly paid them in Europe, but their conduct to women always implies that they suppose them to be virtuous and refined. Such is the respect entertained for the moral freedom of the sex that, in the presence of a woman, the most guarded language is used, lest her ear should be offended by an expression.”

So they honor and respect her virtue. They watch their tongues. They’re careful in their behavior. They treat her with incredible respect, but they listen to her. They care about her opinion. They take it into consideration, and they give her freedom and autonomy in her role.

And then it says, “The legislators of the United States, who have mitigated almost all the penalties of criminal law, still make rape a capital offense, and no crime is visited with more inexorable severity by public opinion.

“They consider nothing more precious than a woman’s honor and nothing which ought so much to be respected as her independence. They hold that no punishment is too severe for a man who deprives her of them against her will.”

So if you committed rape, you were killed. And we don’t even have those strict of laws today. So we’ve loosened up our laws. We’ve made it harder and harder to convict, because there’s more and more sexual acts being committed, and even sometimes the women aren’t sure if they were consenting. And consenting is not the way to have a guardrail around sexual behavior. It just doesn’t work. And Louise Perry goes into why that’s the case.

It says, “Thus, the Americans do not think that men and women have either the duty or the right to perform the same offices, but they show an equal regard for both in their respective parts; and though their lot is different, they consider both of them as beings of equal value.”

So there was good stuff going on. His impression and experience in America was that, as a general rule, women were content with their role. They felt educated, intelligent, respected, loved and honored in their role, and their virtue was protected—and physically as well. And then he says, “Thus then, while they have allowed the social inferiority of women to continue”—in other words, she doesn’t have a lot of authority in the public space, she can’t hold public office—“they have done all they could to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man; and in this respect, they appear to me to have excellently understood the true principle of democratic improvement.” And then he goes on to finish, “I have nowhere…”—and this is so important—and, in fact, before I finish that out, I want to tell you a couple things about this other book by Leonard Sax.

One of the things that’s really fascinating that he goes into is bullying in this other book, and he’s talking about the difference between boys and girls and the difference in how they bully. And then he talks about how he has worked with over 400 schools. Let me see—I think he says he has worked with over 400 schools on this area of bullying and this issue, and how to handle it. And he says, “Sexual harassment is a form of bullying, but the motivation is different. The most common form of sexual harassment is a boy harassing a girl who has rejected his advances. To my observation, at more than 400 schools, the schools that are most effective in preventing sexual harassment are those that teach girls and boys to be ladies and gentlemen. A gentleman does not harass a lady, and a lady will not tolerate harassment.”

So they build up character. They inculcate the children with virtue and confidence, and that solves the problem more than posters or awareness or trainings or shamings or punishments. It’s by elevating those boys and girls, by lifting them to a higher plane and helping them understand that they can be more noble, they can be better, they can be more self-disciplined, they can rein in their passions. And so that leveling up of their character stops the problem. He goes on to say, “Gender is more fragile than we knew, though perhaps we should have known better. Most cultures have taken great care in teaching gender norms. We no longer do. On the contrary”—and contrast this with what I just said was going on in America almost 200 years ago—“on the contrary, our learned professors now actively deconstruct and tear down every gender guidepost in the name of individual liberty,” which is what I’ve said throughout this podcast: that we think that it’s unbridled freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want, with no self-discipline.

And that is not true. When you lose self-discipline, you lose freedom. Period. Personal liberty: you lose discipline, you become an addict. You’re not free when you’re an addict. So then he goes on, “When you tear down every gender guidepost in the name of individual liberty with no awareness of the costs, we need to be careful about the norms we teach. Of course, we don’t want to perpetuate stereotypes like the dumb jock or the dumb blonde. We need to create new ideals of manhood and womanhood that make sense in the 21st century.”

We still need women that are women. We need to explore what femininity means, why women want to be protected and cared for, why they still want to have families and children, what it is in our makeup—whether you defer to a God-creation story or an evolution story, it still comes down to the same hard wiring—and we need to be honest about why, like Chesterton’s fence, those guardrails have been up in society for centuries and centuries, and why they’ve worked. He goes on, “Personhood won’t fly. Boys don’t want to be persons. Neither do girls. Boys want to be men. Girls want to be women. We have to teach them what that means.”

And so you teach them to be ladies and gentlemen. They rein themselves in. They have greater discipline, which creates greater freedom, and then everyone in the school respects each other more. And so I’m not saying that the guardrails and the male–female roles in 1840 America were perfect, and I’m not saying there wasn’t room for improvement, but I’m saying there were clear lines and clear divisions. It was very clear what you did to be a man and very clear what you did to be a woman. And women were protected.

They were safe. He talks about how a young woman could go on a long trip alone and be safe. You can’t even do that now. It was safer for young women in America in 1840 because of the laws, because of the self-discipline, because of the culture, because of the protection of virtue. And now women are—the MeToo movement, I mean, just look around—they’re getting violated all the time because they’ve been fed a bunch of lies about who they are, about everybody being the same, about unbridled passions and sexual behaviors.

So I’m going to read you two last things really quickly as we finish up. This first one is at the end of the book by Louise Perry. I’m going to tell you a couple things that she says and then take us back to Tocqueville for a beautiful cap, and what he said was going on in 1840 and his opinion about the role of women and women and moms. Listen. It’s okay to teach your children to be gentlemen and ladies. In fact, it’s important.

You should protect their virtue. You should encourage waiting, if not till marriage, waiting a long time. You should talk about the importance of living according to traditional sexual mores. I mention this some in my new book when I’m talking about the natural law and how quickly that broke down from the sexual revolution, and even the churches participated, and how damaging that is.

We can’t just go with the flow. We have to stop and think, to look at Chesterton’s fence and say, why were these the guardrails, and were people better off as a general rule? Were people better off in 1840? That’s worth thinking about. So Louise Perry says, “A monogamous marriage system is successful in part because it pushes men away from cad mode, particularly when premarital sex is also prohibited”—again, particularly when premarital sex is also prohibited. If women don’t give it to men, they’ll have to marry them and make a formal commitment, where they will have to be in a covenant of marriage with a spouse and be responsible for the babies that they bring into the world, and they can be held accountable legally if they won’t do that. And women and our daughters are participating, unfortunately, in this premarital sex culture that is just doing so much damage.

“Under these circumstances, if a man wants to have sex in a way that’s socially acceptable, he has to make himself marriageable, which means holding down a good job and setting up a household suitable for the raising of children.” And by the time you’ve gotten through all of Louise Perry’s arguments and studies and statistics, hopefully a lot of people agree with her by the end, because women are incredibly unhappy in this culture and their virtue is not being protected or honored at all. They’re being taken advantage of, and they’re very unhappy and unfulfilled, so many of them. And this is—I mean, what I just read you was 1840. That’s what happened. No premarital sex, guys. And you’ve got to make yourself good marriage material so that a valuable woman will want to be with you. “He has to tame himself. In other words, fatherhood then has a further taming effect, even at the biochemical level. When men are involved in the care of their young children, their testosterone levels drop alongside their aggression and sex drive. A society composed of tame men is a better society to live in for men, for women and for children.”

Because discipline brings confidence, and it brings character, and it brings a better society. Then she goes on: “For some women, paid work outside of the home is a joy and a privilege. For many more, it is a responsibility, and often an onerous one.” And she knows, because she’s talked to a lot of women. “Even those women who enjoy their work are physically incapable of performing it during the early months of a baby’s life. I should know. I began this book at the beginning of my pregnancy and completed it when my son was six months old. Writing is probably one of the easiest jobs to combine with motherhood, but even so, there were weeks on end during which I didn’t write a word because I was too busy caring for my baby.

“And while I could be practically supported by other people, including my husband, I was irreplaceable as mother—not only because I was the only person who could breastfeed, but also because children have a relationship with their mothers that starts from conception, and that relationship cannot be handed over without distress to both mother and baby.” And there’s a lot of good research around that bond as well. It’s irreplaceable. There are certain chemical things and mental, psychological things that happen to a child who’s bonded to their mother in that first year, connected to them physically and being with them almost all the time, that builds a sense of security and stability that you can’t otherwise really get without it.

“I have just one piece of advice to offer in this chapter, and you’ve probably already guessed what it will be. So here it is: get married, and do your best to stay married, particularly if you have children and particularly if those children are still young. And if you do find yourself in the position of being a single mother, wait until your children are older before you bring a stepfather into their home.” And then she goes on, “I know that lifelong marriage, in a sense, is unnatural. It’s not the human norm,” blah, blah, blah. But then she says, “The marriage system has prevailed in the West up until recently. It was not perfect, nor was it easy for most people to conform to, since it demanded high levels of tolerance and self-control. Where the critics go wrong is in arguing that there is any better system. There isn’t.”

And to cap us off, I’m going to read you this last quote that I absolutely love by Tocqueville that speaks to the very heart of who you are. I know this is who you are—what he says right here: “I have nowhere else seen women occupying a loftier position. And if I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: to the superiority of their women.”

Mothers and women who are listening to me, know how irreplaceable you are. Your virtue matters. Your character matters. Your commitment to motherhood and womanhood and femininity matter. Your commitment to proper roles, to teaching boys to be gentlemen and girls to be women, teaching your children to be abstinent sexually and to wait until marriage—all of these things make a better society for us. I believe they’re also spiritual in nature. I believe they nurture us in our relationship with ourselves and with God. I believe they make our world a better place in a myriad of ways we can’t even tangibly understand. But just from the social–economic perspective, it’s invaluable. It’s critical. It’s mission critical. And we have to push back on the sexual revolution and the feminist movement in meaningful ways and say, “No, we’re not doing that. We’re going to make a different world for our children.”

We are on a mission to find our missions and to use them in the service of our families and communities. And we’re partnering. We’re linking arms with each other and with men and women of good faith who want to reinstitute and restore better systems, better virtues to our culture. I’m here. We’re doing this together. Let’s link arms and make our world a better one for our children and our grandchildren by being the stalwart women of character. Work on your education. Learn how to push back properly. Develop your skills of identifying and living according to principles. Learn the worldviews that will help you build bridges. Discover your gifts and talents so that you can use them to serve your fellowmen, and we, together, will make this world a better place to live.

Thank you so much for joining me today, and I’ll see you next time.