The Mission Driven Mom Podcast

What if communication isn’t actually about saying the right words?

In this episode, Audrey Rindlisbacher reframes communication through a deeper, more powerful lens - one rooted in communion, not just conversation. Drawing on insights from C.S. Lewis and timeless principles, she explores how true communication is about unity, attention, and meaningful connection.

If you’ve ever struggled in your relationships, felt misunderstood, or wondered why better “communication skills” haven’t fixed things, this episode will shift how you think - and how you show up.

You’ll learn:

Why communication is more than words, tone, or body language

The connection between communication and communion

How giving, receiving, and attention transform relationships

Why high-quality relationships are the foundation of a meaningful life

Practical ways to deepen connection with God, yourself, and others

This is for any woman or mom who wants to build stronger relationships, grow in emotional and spiritual intelligence, and become more intentional in how she connects.

If you’re ready to stop managing conversations and start transforming relationships, this episode will guide you there.

Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission-Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. And today we’re going to talk about communication.

And I know that may fall a little flat. We have this kind of paradigm in our culture that everything is about communication, and if we could just communicate better, then everything would be better.

And we mean something very specific by that. We usually mean the words we’re saying. Sometimes we talk about body language and how that matters, and tone of voice a little bit. But mostly we think if we just got all the right words right, and we just said all the right things, that our relationships would just be wonderful.

And we go to therapy for this, and we read books, and we go to trainings. And what if communication wasn’t actually what we think it is?

I came across this quote from C.S. Lewis, and it completely reframed the concept of communication for me. And I’ve thought about it differently ever since.

One of the reasons I want to talk about this today is because I’ve been creating a training that we just did recently.

In creating this training, I was talking about natural law and about tools to help women better understand and recognize truth.

And I wanted the women who attended to have an experience with other women who had been through our program and had a great experience.

As I was going back through so many of those testimonials and vetting them for this training, there was a common theme. There were a few common themes. Truth is obviously one of those.

But one of the common themes was relationships.

These women said over and over again how much better their relationships were. All of their relationships—with God and with themselves, which is what Level One is all about—and then their relationships with everybody else had improved.

And it has to do, at least partly, with this concept of communication.

So this is the sentence that I read from C.S. Lewis that really tipped me off:

“I have tried to assume nothing that is not professed by all baptized and communicating Christians.”

I had never thought about the connection between communication, communicating, and communion.

I don’t know why—it had just never occurred to me that they must have the same root word and must have something to do with each other.

Because communion, of course, is when Christians go to church and take the sacrament.

So this got me thinking.

When Lewis says “communicating Christians,” he means people who are actively participating in their faith.

So I went back and did some research. I looked at root words and older definitions. If you’ve been around here long, you know the 1828 dictionary is a resource we use often because we want to understand what words originally meant.

The root of the word commune comes from Latin words meaning identity and unity.

So when you put that together, the root meaning of commune is to unite identities.

Isn’t that fascinating?

When we are communicating, what we are meant to be doing is unifying our identities.

We are taking two separate things and helping them understand each other better, come together more, and move toward unity.

Unity of purpose. Unity of understanding.

In the 1828 dictionary, definitions include:

To converse

To talk together

Familiarity

To partake in the Lord’s Supper

And when you look up “communicating,” it says:

To impart, to give to another

To share jointly

To bestow something to be held, used, or enjoyed

To mutually share in something

So from a Christian perspective, communion is a reciprocal exchange. God gives to you, and you give back.

It is a process of giving and receiving.

And that is what communication actually is.

Communication is not just words.

It is:

Giving

Receiving

Enjoying

Uniting identities

These are elements of communication that we almost never think about.

We focus on body language, skill sets, active listening, and techniques.

But we don’t ask:

What is the goal?

The goal is unity.

The process is reciprocal giving.

So when I think about being in a relationship, and I see communication as a place where I give and receive in order to unite identities, it becomes a completely different experience.

Another aspect of communication comes from Scott Peck.

He taught that the most important form the work of love takes is attention.

When we think about people who truly love others, they:

Give without expecting return

Pay close attention

Are intentional in how they give

He says that true listening requires setting aside our own perspectives so we can enter into someone else’s world.

This is what real communication looks like.

It is not technique.

It is intention.

We can even do this with ourselves.

One of the reasons journaling and discussion are so powerful is because they allow us to:

Listen to ourselves

Empathize with ourselves

Unite our identity internally

Many women carry false beliefs because they have not truly listened to themselves.

Instead of asking:

What principle can help me here?

We ask:

What’s wrong with me?

But when we commune with ourselves and with God, and align with truth, we begin to understand ourselves better.

In communication:

We are set up to give, not just take

We are trying to unite identities

We are offering love, acceptance, and attention

And many moms struggle to give themselves that kind of attention.

Not just comfort or distraction—but deep, meaningful attention to real needs.

Why does communication matter so much?

Because relationships are everything.

Research—like the Harvard study—shows that the people who live the longest and happiest lives have the highest quality relationships.

And those relationships are built on our ability to truly commune.

There is also a deeper reason.

C.S. Lewis, in The Weight of Glory, explains that our relationships matter because every person we interact with has eternal potential.

He says that the weight of our neighbor’s glory should rest on us.

Meaning:

We are participating in who they are becoming.

Every interaction matters.

So I want to leave you with a few questions:

When you communicate:

Are you trying to give or to get?

Are you trying to connect or to control?

Do people feel seen and accepted by you?

What would the world look like if we thought of communication as communion?

As giving, receiving, and uniting identities?

This is why at The Mission Driven Mom, we focus so heavily on relationships.

Because they are at the heart of our happiness or unhappiness.

And they are shaped by our ability to truly communicate.

I want to invite you to join me for an encore of our recent training. I’ll be giving that presentation again in April.

If you want the tools we discussed, the link is in the description.

In the meantime, think about communion.

Unite your identity. Give your attention.

And watch what happens in your relationships.

I’ll see you next time.

Guess what?!

I've spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of months putting together the training I'll be giving this week! (I'm super excited about it by the way 😉.)

And as I was editing it down to make sure it isn't too long, I had to cut out some information I really wanted you to have.

Then I realized - I can just put it in this week's podcast so you still have it! 

I know many of you, like me, feel frustrated, overwhelmed and sometimes even scared with what's going on in our culture. And I want you to better understand WHY these things are happening.

So this week I dive deep into the History of American Education and how it mirrors the moral decline in our culture.

When I made these connections, it literally changed the way I see the world, and how I navigate it.

I WANT that for you too! 

That's why this week I talk about: 

So if you want to...

Then give this one a listen.

And PASS IT ON if it resonates because we both know that understanding the problem is the first step to solving it.

This week you'll gain that understanding! 

With love,
Audrey

P.S. For the rest of this story and more insights on how you use what I share in this podcast to solve your significant problems and move forward in your life, join me in the live training this Thursday night!

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

And if you are someone who has been looking around at our culture and you feel like it’s crumbling, you see the loss of virtue and the loss of truth, you feel frustrated, overwhelmed, maybe even scared, you are not alone. There’s a reason for that. Our culture is declining, and it is scary and overwhelming and difficult to deal with.

So today I want to talk to you about the education that you probably didn’t have that would help you to identify truth, and how that is the key for you and I to solve our significant problems.

You’ve been listening. I’ve been talking about this training that I’m going to do that’s coming up, and building out that training, I’ve had to leave most things out. Originally, I had a story in there that I wanted to share with you, but it didn’t make it into the final cut. And so I figured in today’s podcast, I could share with you what didn’t make it into the training.

And by doing that, it will better prepare you for that training. You’ll have a better idea what you can expect, and you’ll just have some background and some depth around the things that I’m going to share, a better understanding about why it matters so much.

So some of you have probably heard the story that when I was a young mom, I had three kids in six years, and things were really, really rough.

My husband had this pornography issue that he told me about before we got married, but it just got worse after we got married. I was not dealing with it well, and of course my pregnancies were really, really difficult. I was in bed, throwing up, hospitalized.

And then finances were rough because we were a one income family and my husband was commission based, and so I was constantly worried about money. Of course our marriage was struggling through the financial problems and the parenting problems and the pornography problems, as you can imagine.

Then on top of that, we had all these extended family issues that complicated everything. In fact, around this time, both of our parents were separated. Blaine’s were divorcing. I was kind of my mom’s confidant, and it was really, really rough going.

And I just got to this point where I had dedicated myself to my children for six or seven years at this point, and I felt a little brain dead. I felt like I was getting lost in it all. I was starting to feel more and more depression, less and less motivation to do the things that I knew I needed to do to take better care of myself, and I felt like I just needed and wanted something for myself.

I didn’t have any idea what that was.

In fact, I spent like a year looking for something that was for me, that was not going to take over my life. I didn’t want to go have a career, especially at this point when my children were young, but I needed something.

So about this time, I was talking to my sister in law about all these issues. She turned me onto this little college, which unfortunately has since gone defunct. And she said something like, well, you can help build your own curriculum or whatever.

And I was like, what are you talking about? That’s weird.

So when I went to her house, she opened up the computer and she showed me their website. And that moment is just seared on my brain, in her family room, looking at her computer that was sitting on the little desk in the family room.

And the number one thing that struck me so hard was this school listed their curriculum on their website, and it said that they read Plato. And I didn’t even know what to think. I remember like yelling, like bursting out, they read Plato? What in the world?

And then I realized that I had never read Plato. And then I realized that I had never thought about the fact that I had never read Plato. And then I thought, how did I make it through fifteen years of formal education? If we had his writing still, why wasn’t that part of the curriculum?

Well, duh. He’s like one of the smartest people that’s ever lived. You would think that if you wanted to give people a decent education, you would have them read from the smartest people that ever lived, right?

So I was just dumbfounded and so intrigued, so interested.

And it took me quite a while to decide to sign up. And I’ll talk to you more in the training about why I ended up signing up and what it has to do with you and your family and your family legacy.

But I did end up signing up and taking classes. And I want to talk to you about something I’ve really never talked about in this much detail before for the next few minutes because I think it’s really important for me to give you context and a framework around what was happening at this school.

So first of all, we read stuff like Plato. Okay. We read Aristotle. We read, I don’t know, all the people, Plutarch and Archimedes and Marcus Aurelius and Cicero, some whose names I’d heard, some who I hadn’t. I had to become acquainted with people like Hobbes or the Scottish Enlightenment or the Age of Reason thinkers or whatever. Even people in the Renaissance, I only knew the artists at this point.

So we’re reading from the people who had the ideas first or who fleshed them out in ways that were super impactful for the culture.

So that’s radically different. No textbooks. Sometimes there’s a compilation of readings, like short selections from individuals. Sometimes there’s a really, really reputable, well researched, and original writings author to give us a summary of something, and then we would have selections of original writings to go along with that, like for example in American history.

But the focus was to go to the source, to be at the original writing itself. And it was so hard, so incredible. It just made all the difference in the world to read from that person their original idea instead of reading all these other people who were going to tell me what that person thought of whatever.

And that’s what a lot of our textbooks are like today, right? They are four, five, six layers away from the original writing. They read the commentary of someone’s commentary of someone’s commentary instead of just going to the source.

Now, when I tried to read these, I didn’t always get it the first time or the second time or even the third time through, and I didn’t always have time to read them a lot of times through. But I would get a little, and that little bit would open up my mind. It would increase my confidence. It would make new neurons fire in my brain and help me to see things in brand new ways that I never saw them before.

So I signed up and I’m just doing first this distance course, and it’s just the readings, and I’m having a phenomenal time.

In fact, it took me a year and a half to do my first distance course because I didn’t have structure, I didn’t have deadlines, I didn’t have mentoring, I didn’t have other students, I didn’t have anything. I just kind of had a list of readings mostly.

And eventually I ended up hiring a mentor to help me finish the course because it was like I was so stuck in The Federalist Papers. I just could not figure it out.

Well, eventually there were distance courses, and I was able to go to a real classroom with students, with a mentor. And I didn’t know until that point the other aspects of what this education was like.

And I’m going to talk to you in just a minute about its history and its rich context and why it matters so much.

So we get into these classrooms, and instead of having a teacher, we have what they keep calling a mentor. The mentor is way ahead of us, but they’re also like a student with us.

And instead of having rows of chairs facing this teacher and having all these lectures happening every time and we’re just sitting there absorbing information from the guru of gurus like you would do in college, often we were in a circle. If we were online, we were all just equal squares right on the screen, and we were all talking to each other.

It was Socratic discussion, which I didn’t know what that was, and I didn’t know it came from Socrates, and I didn’t know Plato taught us about it. I didn’t know it meant learning through asking and answering deep, meaningful questions.

And the mentor led because the mentor is way ahead and they are sculpting it. They are using the thoughts and ideas of this really rich reading and the people that come with all of their background and their personal experience, and they’re using all of that to sculpt this beautiful environment where we all learn from each other.

And they’re using incredible questions, and they’re using other resources that they’ve read, and they’re using their experience, and they’re using their well honed reasoning skills.

And that’s one of the goals that they’re trying to help us with, is just to think better. Just to actually stop, slow down, think things through, ponder them, sit on them for a while, and really have them percolate in our minds and in our hearts so that they become part of us.

And it was crazy in these discussions because the mentor would ask me what I thought, and that had never happened before.

And then Jacques Barzun teaches, he’s one of many incredible people that teach how to run great discussions, he says that great mentors will push their students back up against the wall of the great absolutes.

And so that’s what the mentor is doing, is inviting conversation, helping us to be vulnerable, helping us to engage in a quality conversation with each other, but then pushing back against our assumptions and against the answers that you just give off the cuff or the things you’ve been taught to think by your culture.

And they make you question your assumptions and conclusions that you’ve drawn and beliefs that you have and ways of being that you’ve adopted because you might not be in line with good logic. You might be living out beliefs that aren’t helpful to you and you might be totally out of line with truth.

And so I came to understand over time, as I eventually wrote courses for this school, and I’ll talk about that in just a second, and I was taught to mentor, and I got lots and lots of practice there, and then of course for the last twenty years I’ve gone on to practice that lots and lots of places.

And what I learned is that this Socratic discussion is so valuable because it teaches you to listen way better to other people, to be far more empathic to their thoughts and ideas because you’re letting them talk through what’s going on with them.

It really helps you to hone your reasoning skills and to have to think through things. Your communication skills are really leveled up. Your diplomacy, you have to back off and be more careful about what you say and how you say it because there’s lots of different people in the room. But you also have to increase your courage and ability to say what you really believe, but to be empathic and charitable and kind in the way that you do it.

And what I started to see eventually over the years was these tools that I gained in these Socratic discussions were developing and honing my relationship skills. I was just better at relationships in general because I had learned how to ask better questions, how to listen more intently, how to push back kindly with questions, how to state what I believed, how to reason and think things through.

It was really, really phenomenal.

But also we gained confidence in our ability to think things through, to stand on the few truths that we did come to, to know what we believed and why we believed it and have thought through it clearly, and why that mattered and how we could live that out.

And I also came to see that this whole process, as I eventually got a master’s degree and studied the history of education and all the way back to the history of Western civilization from the beginning, the development of character and virtue has always been the primary goal of education.

Great philosophers have always said what makes us different from all the other creatures on earth is our ability to use our conscience, the fact that we’re conscious, and our common sense and our reason to elevate ourselves above our primal instincts and to discipline ourselves to live in line with what is good and what is true and what is beautiful.

To be on the hunt for those things and to align our lives with those things.

That’s always been the primary goal of education, not income earning. That was trade work. And you could go be trained and you could apprentice and all these things to be able to earn a living. But education was not about earning a living. It was about the development of the human being to be supremely human.

And the supremely human person is the most virtuous person.

You can see this thread all through the great thinkers and leaders throughout history, and I was seeing that and learning that. It was incredible.

We also learned from writings by, for example, John Adams to his son John Quincy, and Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and these other great founders, and even before, with Marcus Aurelius and others, that you also need to write, and you need to write for yourself. You need to copy down what the greats have said. You need to pick it apart. You need to think it through.

And they used to call these commonplace books, and it would have extensive notes from the things that they were learning and then their thoughts about those things.

And so we were encouraged to journal, to keep commonplace books, to even write in our books, which I came to do. And I gained a lot of skills for tracking a lot of things in my book and really good bookmarking skills that have been a huge help for me.

Now I can go back to the questions that I’ve asked and the quotes that were my favorite and the arguments that I’ve had with authors as I’ve read, and I can go back to those things and review the books that I’ve read and rediscuss them. And it’s been a huge help in my mothering and just in general with being a mentor and all of that.

And so journaling as a way, because our thoughts run so fast that when we journal, we have to slow down and we have to take all of these fragmented ideas and make cohesive sentences and paragraphs out of them, and that fine tunes our thinking. It helps us to be better, clearer thinkers, again honing our logical thinking skills, our reasoning skills.

Also connecting where our emotions are being sculpted, they’re being created by the things that we’re thinking. Our emotions are then in turn affecting our thoughts, and the interplay of thoughts and emotions and which ones are true and which ones are false, all of that is so, so helpful.

We also wrote papers. We would have writing seminars, I guess you’d call it, because what was happening in this school was that it wasn’t a teacher student dynamic. I wasn’t just sitting there absorbing information and regurgitating it to a professor and saying the things that I thought they wanted to hear and that would please them or that would get me a high grade.

I really was there to become the best me. I was there for me. And by virtue of the fact that I became a better me, I was a better wife, I was a better friend, I was a better sister, I was a better mom, right? Because I’m becoming a better me.

The structure, these educational principles that were being utilized in this school were so incredibly beautiful and helpful for my personal development. That’s why this was the educational model in the West for two thousand years. Up until about a hundred years ago, we lost it. It’s because it’s the development of the human being to help us be fully human and to help us be virtuous.

And so I’m there with a team of students. We are learning together. And the mentor is on this journey with us. They’re guiding us. They’re helping us. They’re showing us the path forward. They’re helping us course correct and stay on the path, but they’re learning right alongside us.

One of the first things I learned as a mentor was that when I got into a group of individuals who were ready to learn, were ready to grow, because that’s really what this is. It’s all about personal growth.

Because so what if you read it? So what if you pass a test on it if it doesn’t become part of your character and if you don’t become a better person because of it? It’s not helpful. The only reason those things are helpful is if we’re trying to build a career, and this education was not about that.

Ironically, the more virtuous you became and the more your character was developed, the better you would be as an owner or an employee. That was secondary. The development of you was the primary focus.

And so we’re a team now. We’re discussing every week. We’re diving deep into these readings. We are learning from the best of the best, and it’s elevating us in every way.

And then we have these writing seminars. And because we’re a team of learners, we also give feedback on each other’s writing. Those seminars could be painful.

We had to read part of our writing aloud to the entire class, and they all gave feedback. They all told me what they thought about my paper, and it often meant kind of picking it apart.

I remember one, I can’t remember what it was even about, but it was kind of like to my sister who was giving me grief about stuff, indirectly. And after I read the first page, the room was really quiet, and then one of the other students said, Audrey, I feel like you’re yelling at me.

And it was really important feedback.

I remember another discussion where my husband was in a class with me and he started going off about a bunch of stuff about, I think it was about Alexander Hamilton or maybe it was John Adams, and the mentor just was like, what are you talking about? Finally she was like, you better go home and get your facts straight because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

And so again, course correcting, helping us to develop our character, to become better thinkers.

And these writing seminars were difficult but so enlightening and really helped us to become better at expressing our ideas, which so much of life, so much of happiness, so much of relationships is about. Good communication, being empathic listeners, being good at diplomacy and sharing our thoughts and ideas.

Then what was really cool is that we would have different assignments and we would hand things in and we would get feedback, right, but not a grade. Because instead of it being like, well, you tried for a minute and you had a deadline and now this label lives on as a mark for or against you, it was like, no. Do it until it’s great.

So our assignments, we would redo and redo and redo until they were quality. And you can just imagine how much you would learn having to do things that way.

At the end of the class, we would have oral exams. And in today’s culture, I’m always like, why in the world aren’t we doing more oral exams? We’ve got this AI issue. We’ve got all the cheating in our schools. You can’t cheat on an oral exam. You know it or you don’t.

And I know it takes a little more time, but it’s so worth it.

And our oral exams were usually administered in front of the entire class. And so there would be a couple mentors, and sometimes we would test each other. And so we would bring quality questions from the semester’s long learning or the course learning or whatever it was, and we would question each other, and we would learn so much in those oral exams from each other and from ourselves as we had to express what this had meant to us and how we had grown from what we had learned.

So this classroom became a real place of incredible growth and personal development, and I forged relationships that have become lifelong because we were so changed by the experience that we were having.

These beautiful educational principles had a profound impact on me and on my life. They have completely changed the trajectory of everything that I’ve done since. It has changed the way I manage my relationship with myself, my relationship with God, and all my other relationships.

It helped me gain a lot of self discovery that sent me on a new trajectory and introduced me to things that have become my life’s work, that have been so transformational for me.

I wanted to give you a quick example of one of the things that happened to me in this process, and then I’ll talk to you a little bit before we finish up about why this matters so much for you and I and for our culture.

So somewhere around this time, a couple years in, I was given the opportunity to take a Euclid class. Now if you don’t know who Euclid is, he was the great geometer. So his work was written, I didn’t look it up, I don’t know, two or three hundred AD, something like that.

He wrote the definitive book on geometry.

When I heard we were going to take this geometry class, I thought back on my high school years.

So when I was in middle school, I was given a test and I scored well, and that meant that I had to take Algebra One in eighth grade. So I took Algebra One in eighth grade. I did fine.

And it also meant that I had to take honors geometry my freshman year of high school, and I totally bombed. And of course, even though they’re both math, geometry and algebra are very different. And obviously I think a little more algebraically than I do geometry wise.

And so, I mean, I was on the cheerleading squad, and I did so poorly in my class I couldn’t cheer. It was very disheartening. It was very embarrassing. It was a big deal at the time. And so I was demoted. I had to go back to regular geometry. I had to wait a whole cycle to get my grades back up to cheer again. It was really terrible.

And I did okay in the regular geometry class. And so as you can imagine, all my life and into adulthood, far into adulthood, I carried this mindset of, I’m terrible at math. I don’t ever want to do that again.

I did manage to get my way through Algebra Two, but then I just didn’t take math again if I didn’t have to.

So I called up this teacher of this Euclid class and I was like, it sounds intriguing. I know that I love these original writings, but let me tell you my story and my history, and I don’t think I can do it.

And he was like, no, no, no, no. I promise you, we will stay with you until you get it. And you’ll learn proof by proof how to think more logically and why this has been a staple in Western education.

And in fact, I later learned that pretty much all the greats did study Euclid. It did help them to think more logically and to understand how evidence is built on evidence and how proofs work. But especially Abraham Lincoln, it was a core element of his education to study Euclid.

And of course I did it. I got through Book One. I have somewhere in this house, in a box somewhere, my notebook from Euclid where I worked out the proofs. And it was hard, and I did the work, and my confidence was so high when I was done.

When I got my first proof, it was a huge moment for me, and I realized I can do this. I can think more logically. I can figure these things out.

I went on to get a master’s degree and to study the history of Western education especially, and read the great writings from these individuals that talked about what education should be and should look like.

Like I said, it was clear that character development, what is it for, is its purpose.

And in terms of American education, of course the Bible was at the heart. It was the core book that every child went through school with, and there’s some other fundamental reasons for that, which I’m actually going to talk about at the training that we do.

And they were to be guided by the truths and the principles that were in the Bible in all their lives. Because up until the turn of the twentieth century, the goal of education was still the development of character and virtue.

And all through the eighteen hundreds, all the major universities in America had the same curriculum. In fact, I’ve got a book over here that actually outlines what the curriculum list for all four years for I think it’s got Harvard and Yale and a couple others on there, and it’s virtually the same.

And there was this common canon. Up until nineteen hundred, Americans had all these shared ideas. They had all read the Bible. They had all studied Shakespeare. They had all read some of these core classics.

Men that went on, it was predominantly men, some women, but predominantly men, that went on to these high universities and into leadership positions had the same ideas about governmental principles and economic principles, and it was kind of the glue that held the country together.

But then at Harvard, Charles Eliot became the president, and he decided that the students weren’t satisfied with their education and he wanted to improve it and make them happy, and so he instituted an elective system that was in full swing by 1899.

The other universities, especially the Ivy League, pushed back against him hardcore, and they told him not to do it, and he just did it anyway.

So once that was in play, then eventually the other colleges went along, and so we lost this liberal education, and with it we lost the tradition and what was at the heart of it. And that was that our education is about our personal development, and only very secondarily is it about anything else.

As socialization. And of course, having been homeschooled on and off, I can tell you how many people came to me and were like, well, what are you going to do about their socialization? Because thanks to Dewey and others in the forties, socialization came to be synonymous with modern education, that children need to be socialized.

And that was just never the goal.

So he puts this elective system into place. The other colleges adopt it. Pretty soon you don’t have the core canon of readings. They’re not in these original works anymore. We lose it, lose it, lose it.

And so by the thirties and forties at the University of Chicago, you’ve got Robert Hutchins who becomes this young university president. He brings over Mortimer Adler. They realize, and Robert Hutchins, I took a lot of quotes from him, Mortimer Adler, Mark Van Doren, and there were other people in other places, in other countries as well, that were mourning the loss of the liberal education.

And that’s what it was called. The education I was receiving at this college, which unfortunately did not last many years, was traditionally called liberal arts education or classical education or the classical liberal arts. It was the education to be free.

It is the root word of liberty, library, of libro in Spanish, which means book.

And so when I tell people I have a liberal education or liberal arts degree, they really do think it has something to do with the arts because we’re so far from that.

In fact, the great economist, in his book, he talks about how in the preface to his book, he’s like, I don’t understand why Americans let the word liberal be hijacked by people on the left because that’s a very rich word and it’s about their heritage.

Now they have this political party called liberal, and it kind of in some circles has a bad connotation. And liberal does not mean free for all, everybody gets free stuff. It means freedom through discipline, through reasoning.

Mortimer Adler said that we free our minds by disciplining them. And that’s really what goes on when you get this kind of education.

And so anyway, lots of individuals in different countries were mourning the loss of this liberal education, especially in America.

And The Road to Serfdom, that’s what it is, that’s the book of the economist whose name I can’t remember right now. And part of that road to serfdom is the loss of this liberal education.

In fact, I’ve got a couple quotes. Robert Hutchins said this, and this is all happening in the forties, and we’ll talk a little bit more about this in the training, but this is all the rich context and backstory that I just don’t have time to get into in an hour and a half with you in the training.

Robert Hutchins said, we have come to the point where the pursuit of truth for its own sake is actually regarded as dangerous.

This has to do with, eventually we went into modernism and postmodernism and our postmodern age where we’re being told that it’s your truth, my truth, and there isn’t any absolute truth. And of course there is, which we’re going to talk about at the training as well.

Mark Van Doren said, a university can and should study first principles. It can concern itself with the permanent truth about man as man.

And Robert Hutchins said about, well, just to give you a little background, around this time Dewey is changing the educational system. All of these things are coming into play. It’s turning into a socialization experiment, and Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler and these other people are pushing back, pushing back, pushing back.

And Robert Hutchins eventually said, my mistake was that I thought I was a successful evangelist for the liberal arts education, when actually I was a stopper in the bathtub.

And so liberal arts lost, socialization won, and we have the modern education that we have. And most of us that are alive today just don’t know the difference because it’s been a hundred years now, a hundred and twenty five years since this liberal education was squeezed out.

I could tell you a lot more stories and give you a lot more examples, but I think you get the gist.

And so the reason, if you’ve ever heard of the Great Books of the Western World or heard of the Harvard Classics, the reason that we have those collections of classics is because they were born out of this loss of the liberal arts because they weren’t in the schools anymore.

This was Charles Eliot saying, okay, well we have the elective system now, and we kind of squeezed out a lot of the classics, but what we’ll do is we’ll put them in a set, we’ll call it the Harvard Classics, we’ll create this book set. And so it was in libraries, it was sold.

Hutchins and Adler and others put together the Great Books of the Western World, which was printed by Encyclopedia Britannica and peddled door to door in the fifties and the sixties. They started up Great Books classes because they were just trying to do everything they could to hang on to this education.

Now the reason all of this matters, I’m sure you’ve drawn some of your own conclusions about why I am talking about this in depth and why these rich educational principles matter so much, it’s because you and I were robbed of the education that would have taught us better to think logically, to reason, to identify the good, the true, and the beautiful. And our culture would be more grounded on what’s true and good and beautiful.

But there’s two things that this school didn’t do well.

I have a very superficial understanding of what goes on at most of the liberal arts colleges, the only place you can get this education anymore really.

University of Dallas has a pretty good program there. There are a dozen, two dozen of these liberal arts colleges scattered around the country, and they do use these educational principles to a large degree still. They are steeped in classics. They have added more modern science and things like that, which is relevant, which is fine.

They’re insanely expensive. There are a few that are a little more affordable, but Hillsdale is one of the cheapest. It’s around thirty five thousand a year tuition. It’s the cheapest I’ve been able to find. It’s the one I’m most acquainted with. I’ve visited there on a couple occasions and met the president and toured the classes and attended classes there and done some of their online classes.

And so I know the most about them. They’re one of the best.

They go all the way up to eighty, ninety, a hundred thousand a year just for tuition, not for living as well.

So this is still available in a few places. It’s insanely expensive. I think that these schools do one of the aspects my little college didn’t do well, but I have not seen them do the other.

And so as we wind down here, let me just give you a little more context and a better understanding of some of the things we’re going to talk about in the training.

The first thing that my college didn’t do great, and I don’t know how well these modern universities do it, is when I was about a year into my studies, I went to a little conference. I mean it was tiny because he was visiting little college, and the president of the college was there talking.

And he was an amazing guy. He kept calling them scholar skills or study skills, and he kept saying, you’re only going to be able to get this incredible education if you have the scholar skills.

And although they had really great Socratic discussion, really great writing seminar, and they told us to keep a commonplace journal, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

And so I raised my hand and I was like, where are these wonderful scholar skills? How can I get them? I’m ready to go. I want to be the best student I can be.

And all he said was, what are you currently studying?

I told him I was studying worldviews.

And he said, okay, well just keep going.

In other words, they had not made a plan for it. They didn’t know. They hadn’t ever put them in one place.

Maybe some of them had some of the skills.

So the first kind of entry point for me in learning how to even administer this type of education, and even more in depth, how to get it for myself and really get robust lifelong learning skills, was that I was like, okay, well I’m going to have to figure it out.

So I went and studied several books and did a bunch of practice over time to gain good study skills. Like I was talking about, the bookmarking skills, the question asking skills, getting better at leading discussion, and also just how to do interdisciplinary connections and all of that kind of stuff.

And in the end, I figured out a lot of things that were super helpful. I ended up building a course for this college, and then I was able to travel and teach this course to a lot of their students around the country. It was really fun. It was really rewarding to teach people how to learn.

And luckily I’ve been able to carry that into my programs and offerings. And so these educational principles that I was taught at this school, plus other things that I’ve learned in addition, have made their way in there to really give our students the best experience possible.

The other thing that they didn’t do well, well, maybe two things. One other thing that they didn’t do well was sometimes it was just too much.

I’m all for let’s read some Plato, but you cannot give adults the same education that you give college students. They don’t have the time.

And so what they could have done better is what I’ve tried to do in my programs, and that is highly vet great content so that just reading one small section of a page or two of Plato, accompanied by a little bit of Seven Habits, layered with a really great youth novel or whatever the case might be, so that you can see continuity of the ideas and you can see them in multiple places, then you go dig into scripture and you make these interdisciplinary connections, and it helps you to better identify truth.

Which leads into the other thing that they didn’t do well, and that was that even though we talked a lot about truth and being truth seekers, I was introduced to the natural law framework through, and I’ve said this before, the first thing I read was that John Locke reading. And that was the first time I ever, ever heard the term.

Then I was turned onto a couple other authors that talked about the natural law. But really that framework was never delineated. It was never talked about. I was never taught what the natural law really is, how it really works, what first principles are, what principles are, what applications are, how they all fit together, how to find them.

And I never could find a mentor that could walk me through all of that.

And even though it’s all throughout the great books and many, many different people talk about it in different ways, I was really left on my own for many years to niche in on that natural law framework, to build out my own strategies and frameworks and checklists and practices and tools for uncovering all the layers of it and figuring out how to figure it out and how to have it change my life and the lives of the people that I taught it to.

And so Hillsdale doesn’t do it that way. And I don’t know if any of these other liberal arts colleges do that.

And so that was really kind of unfortunate, but it became my life’s work. It became the thing that I’ve been passionate about for twenty years. And the more I learned about it, the better person I became, the more beautiful the world is, the more I love God, and the more I’m able to help others to identify and live according to truth.

So the tragedy in all of this, of course, is that you and I were robbed of a beautiful educational experience that would have helped us to be more logical in our thinking, better communicators, better at our relationships. It would have helped us to understand truth better and to be more virtuous.

We also don’t have a place where we can go and learn about what truth really is and the framework of the natural law and why that matters so much.

What I found in my little college was that the natural law, they didn’t understand, I think maybe, just how vital that was. That natural law framework made its way into our Constitution. It was prevalent in the colleges prior to the nineteen hundreds. And so, and the natural law is talked about in our founding documents, so we know that it was talked about.

We know that it was the lens through which people saw the world in the West up until a hundred years ago, and we know that it was understood and these men were trying to understand first principles and trying to live according to principles.

These men and women were trying to build solid foundations in their lives and in our nation with the natural law framework, and using these great works and these educational principles to elevate themselves.

And so it’s just a tragedy that you and I find ourselves in a world, in a culture, without these irreplaceable tools. The inability to really understand what truth is, to identify first principles and principles for ourselves, and know how to live them, to know how to be self educating and how to sculpt and develop our reason and communication skills, we are at a huge disadvantage.

We have been robbed of those things, and it is so vital that we restore them.

And this is why the answer in our culture is not, like I said at the beginning, leaders matter. It’s not that leadership doesn’t matter. It matters. But the better we understand truth and principles, the better we can choose the leaders that will also choose that for us.

But the real answer is for moms to lift themselves, which will lift their family, and they will lift the culture if we own it for ourselves.

If we get serious about learning how to place our lives and our families on a solid foundation of true principles, everything else will be better, and our culture will have a shift because we are raising the next generation. So if we raise them with better principles, our world will be a better place.

And this is exactly what I’m passionate about restoring. This is exactly what I care the very most about. Everything that I have done and everything that I do and everything that I will do is about lifting you so you can lift your family, and so we can all together lift our culture.

And we’re going to go into all of these ideas in more depth in this training, and I’m going to give you some frameworks and tools that are going to really help you to engage and let the truth make you free, which is what we all want.

To know how to develop individually, to find balance between our own needs and those of our families, to solve our significant problems, to begin to reach our potential, to become all that we can become while still building the most principled, beautiful family culture we can possibly build.

We’re going to talk about that at the training. The link is in the description, and I’ll see you there.

Join Audrey’s free training to learn how to build a more principled home and become more intentional in your leadership as a mother. 

Register here 👉 https://go.themissiondrivenmom.com/webinar-registration

In this episode, Audrey Rindlisbacher shares the story behind The Mission Driven Mom and the journey that brought it to where it is today.

What started as a small class for mothers eventually grew into a movement focused on helping women lead their homes with truth, principles, and purpose. But the path was not simple. 

Audrey opens up about the early success of the program, the challenges that nearly shut it down, and the difficult decisions that led to rebuilding it in a stronger and more intentional way.

She also shares the vision guiding the future of Mission Driven Mom and why she believes mothers have a powerful role to play in strengthening families and rebuilding culture.

In this episode you will hear:

If you want to understand the mission behind this work and where it is headed next, this episode gives you a deeper look behind the scenes.

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’m super excited for you to be here with me today, and it’s going to look a little bit different because I want to share something with you that’s been going on behind the scenes with The Mission Driven Mom.

I want to kind of pull back the curtain and show you a little bit of the backstory because we’ve made some new commitments. We decided to really up our game in 2026. You’ve probably noticed that on the podcast, on socials, in our emails, and this is all part of this new effort that we’re making.

We have this new vision for the coming months and the coming years, and why all of that is important to me and to our team, but also very important to you and important to your families and communities and our culture.

And so I’m going to tell you all of how we got to where we are and where we go from here.

Now, some of you have been with us for years now. Maybe you’ve been here almost from the beginning. And when we launched, I have got to say it was really just kind of a glorified hobby for me.

I’ve told the story many places of going to a moms’ class and recognizing the pain in the women around me and understanding for the first time that other women needed the tools that I had discovered that had really revolutionized my home and my life and made such a huge difference for me.

And so I determined to make that available, and I didn’t have any idea how it was going to go. I had taught classes in the past, and I just came up with a price that was quite a bit more than I had charged before and seemed fair, but just was an arbitrary price, and threw it out into the world, and it stuck.

And to be honest, and I say this very humbly, it really was far more successful than I ever anticipated it being. And it went a lot further than I expected it was going to go.

And of course, we launched it. Level One took off, and I knew we needed to have an event. I really wanted to celebrate the women and have them walk across the stage and have a deadline and a solid goal for when they were going to be finished.

But I also wanted us to get together and see each other in person. And so we held our first celebration, and it was just a huge success. We filled the room. It was so much fun and so full of joy and had this graduation ceremony, and some of our students spoke, and it was so rewarding and enriching.

And then from there it took off.

The women that had finished needed a Level Two, and they needed a Level Three because I had a conception of how this whole thing would look, but I hadn’t built anything but Level One when we started.

And then the moms wanted their teens to have this experience. They have also asked for a program for their husbands, which we’ve never developed yet.

And as time went on, we were building content like crazy, and we were trying to continue to service the students and build content at the same time for the events.

And then we had women coming up, and so I built Level Three, and then they were able to graduate, and we launched a leadership team. And Level Three actually wasn’t all the way finished. It was just a pilot.

And around that time, it got past my pain point. And I think maybe I’ve said this before, but I did not go into this with any business experience. I did not anticipate it ever getting this big.

And we had too many people. We were running through too much money, and we were charging way too little.

And that was just because of inexperience. And it was because I hadn’t done my market research, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know. And I needed to learn from my own experience really how to do it differently.

And so we brought everything down to a really small group and then eventually let everyone go.

And we went quiet for a while.

And there was a time where I just thought, I’m going to move this program over to another platform so I can keep my promise and make sure that women have it for life, and I’m going to write the books that I feel like I need to write. Maybe I’ll finish and make Level Three formal. Maybe I won’t. I don’t know.

And a year and a half of time went by. I wasn’t podcasting. I really wasn’t doing anything. I was just fine tuning the program, moving it onto a new platform, making sure that everything was all cleaned up, and just trying to get rid of any unnecessary expenses.

I had done a lot of studying business in the meantime and I had learned a lot, but I just didn’t know if I wanted to go there again.

It ended in a pretty painful way. I felt badly about how much of our own personal reserves, and not just the time, but lots of money, had gone into the business trying to keep it alive.

We’d lost a lot of money, and I just wasn’t sure what to do with it. It just sat in the back of my mind.

And really, it’s pretty much my husband who is the reason why we’re back here where we are.

I don’t know if I would have had the courage, the gumption, the support that I needed to try it again if he hadn’t come to me last year and just said, we have to champion this. It blesses people’s lives. It’s got to be done.

And I said, I’m not going to talk about it unless we put the business principles in place that we learned last time, we quickly learn as many more as we possibly can, and really build this business on principle. And we do our market research so that we know really how to run it properly, how to price it properly, how to market it properly, all the pieces.

And we didn’t have all the answers, and I don’t need to have all the answers, but we definitely decided we were going to go for it.

And that’s largely thanks to my husband.

We did that. We had some reserves because the teen program kept selling, and every once in a while women would come and buy the moms program. And we have schools that do the teen program and whatnot.

And we were going along. We had one employee. We had Anne working with us. She’s incredible, and she was organizing everything in the background and just helping us with things.

And then we bought a program, and one thing led to another. We invited some people back. That miraculously happened. And we got to this point in the fall where we needed to invest again.

We had run through the revenue that had been sitting there for the last couple years, and we needed to put money in again.

And I didn’t realize that when I came back, I’d drawn a line in the sand. And when we got to that moment, I realized, oh, I’ve drawn a line in the sand. I do not want to take those kind of risks again. I don’t want to feel guilty about that again.

My husband was like, what’s going on? I thought we were all in. I thought we were just doing this.

And I was like, yeah, but

And he’s like, but what?

And I was like, I don’t know.

And so I had to really go deep inside.

I set everything aside, and for three weeks I did almost nothing else besides pray, ponder, research, study, think, and journal.

And the overriding question was, why?

Why would I do this again?

I can see the benefit that it is to women, but can’t I just throw it into a platform and charge a little bit of money and just let women buy it that want it?

Can I just

I don’t care about the money. It would be fun to watch a business grow, but not for business’ sake.

Why would we do this?

Why would I do this again?

I mean, in a few months we’re empty nesters, and we can pretty much do whatever we want and have all kinds of free time. And so why would I tie myself down? Why would I put myself to work? Why would I give myself a mission? And why would I risk my own personal money that I could spend on other things to do that?

Why would we do this?

And it just needed to be bigger. Not bigger than the moms that we want to bless, but I knew by this point that unless there’s a strong marketing engine behind something, it will never go anywhere.

It seems hypothetically like a good idea to throw something onto a cheap platform and just quote, make it available. But I have learned that the only things that make it to the most people are the things that are the best marketed.

That’s really the bottom line, is that you have to have a good marketing engine behind anything that you do, whether it’s a for profit or a nonprofit. No matter what you’re doing, your organization, you have to get the word out if you want people to be influenced by it.

And so that means that we have to be competitive in our pricing. That means we need good amounts of revenue so that we can crank it back into marketing so that we can get the word out.

So I knew all of that, and I knew that I couldn’t go back into this half heartedly. I couldn’t go back in hoping I wouldn’t have to put money in, hoping I wasn’t going to have to put time in, hoping I wasn’t going to have to build systems and train people and actually really build a robust business for real.

And so I needed a big enough why.

And I want to read to you some of the sentences and paragraphs and concepts that I wrote about during that three weeks, because by the time this was done, by the time I got to the end of that three weeks, I knew that this was my call.

I knew that other women who had said yes to that call again last year, and even more coming into this year, we were here for a reason.

We have important things to do.

And even though every individual matters, and even though we want every single mom to have it, and we want every single mom and her family to be impacted by principles and have their life changed, it’s even bigger than that.

It’s bigger than me. It’s bigger than our team. It’s bigger than you. It’s bigger than all of us.

So I’m going to read to you some of the thoughts. This is very raw, uncut, just me journaling, talking to you about you, about the women and moms that would be influenced by the work that we’re doing and why. Why I would give my life to this. Why this would be where I put my energy.

Moms see every day the negative effects on their children of the lack of virtue in our culture. Often it worries or scares them, and they don’t know what to do about it besides training their children differently. But even that is difficult because it goes against the culture.

So this is what I was writing.

So here’s more. I’m going to read a couple pages to you.

So moms feel stuck and scared and overwhelmed as mothers, but also personally unfulfilled because they know motherhood is their first calling, but not their only one.

Many don’t have enough self awareness and self knowledge to know how to harness their gifts effectively for their own enrichment and to then use those gifts in the service of others.

They don’t feel seen. Sometimes they feel that they and their own interests and desires don’t matter. They’re always coming second or third or fourth because they want to be great moms, but they don’t know how to do it differently and it’s just getting old.

But they’re also women of integrity who begin to feel miserable as they put their family first and can’t find balance, and they long to do more and be more, but they believe that this will leave their family behind and make them a bad mom.

So a lot of what I was writing about was just what is the situation that moms find themselves in.

And I was that right there, and I understand it perfectly, and I empathize with all of those pain points and more.

And then I went on, and this is again just all different thoughts thrown down on paper.

Our culture is suffering so much. We’ve moved away from the education that would have trained us to live according to true principles and pursue truth and virtue. And that’s why we need an army of moms that can train up a new culture.

We need moms who get their crap together and start making a difference.

And again, this is me a little raw, unplugged. I was upset about the culture, upset at where we find ourselves.

So I wrote, and I don’t care if they think they can’t. If moms think they can’t do this, and I don’t care if they don’t want to, or they don’t know how. They’re needed.

Their education is insufficient to find the balance, thrive as women and mothers, and make this cultural shift no matter how much modern education they got, because they don’t know how to live by principles, just like I didn’t.

And if they don’t have some balance and resources, they don’t know what needs fixing and how to fix it, that’s an educational problem.

And because they don’t know how, they console themselves that all that matters is their kids. They tell themselves that they’re perfectly justified in playing small and not taking risks. They believe no one expects them to change the world or even their neighborhood, so they don’t.

But if they don’t, who will?

Because moms don’t need to do this so they can feel important or have purpose and deep meaning, although they will.

It’s not even so their kids will see their example, although they will.

It’s because the world is rejecting truth and we need champions of truth. And moms have more motivation than anyone else to make a change in our culture because they want a better world for their kids.

We need a movement, something worth fighting for, sacrificing for, and giving our lives to. Providing a healthier culture for our grandchildren.

So for any mom that is listening right now, here’s what I wrote.

I want to take you to a new life where you have power and influence over yourself, your family, and your community. A life where you’re seen and needed and used and you’re making a difference and you know it, and your family is on the journey with you every step of the way, because when mothers are lifted, the culture is lifted.

I want to give you two new identities.

The first one is, as a mission driven mom, you work on yourself so you can show up differently for yourself and your family. You seek truth, identify it, and stabilize your life with it. You learn to balance your own personal growth with that of your family. You become intentional and begin leading your family to a more principled, centered, intentional, servant leadership focused life.

You become powerful, confident, self accepting, and intentional.

And then once you graduate from the MDM Academy, you can join our leadership team.

And in this role, you see yourself as a member of a vast community of moms dedicated to lifting the culture and reinstating virtue and a love of country. You will surround yourself with women who know and speak truth with courage, women who see real problems in their communities and work together to apply principled solutions.

You are one of many noble, courageous, virtuous women who elevate the people around you and invest in each other’s worthy projects and goals. You and other moms like you become the hope for our future.

Now, in order to accomplish this movement, we’re doing a whole bunch of things.

We’ve hired experts and built a powerhouse team of incredible women who know how to do their role with absolute excellence.

We’ve used best business practices to get us supremely organized.

We’ve put the time into market research to bring you the best product at a price that is still below market value, but where compensation is sustainable for us to stick around and serve you for a very long time.

We’ve refined your journey in the Academy and beyond.

We’ve reintroduced the MDM Celebration, and it’s coming again this fall. The theme is Mothers of Creation, and I hope to see you there.

We’re finalizing Level Three so that it will be available permanently.

We’ve outlined the Clapham Leadership Team and its role in our communities.

We have women finishing up mission projects who will graduate this fall.

And I’ll be releasing a new book this summer and another one coming next year.

There’s so much going on and so much to look forward to.

Now, Henry David Thoreau said, for every thousand hacking at the leaves of evil, there is one hacking at the root.

MDM is striking at the root.

We’re taking first ourselves, and then our families, and then our communities, back to natural law, to truth, and to virtue, and providing principled solutions to difficult community issues, which will lead to lasting healthy solutions.

Are you ready to do something that’s really going to matter?

That will be one of the deepest sources of meaning, fulfillment, and joy in your life?

That will have the greatest lasting impact?

That will bring renewal and support to you and your family?

That will build the most beautiful lifelong friendships and sense of community you’ve ever known?

And fill your days with a sense of determination you’ve never had and lift you and your children and your community like nothing else can?

If so, then please join me and other mission driven moms on this journey as we link arms to change the world, beginning right now with you.

Because we can’t accomplish this alone.

So please join us and share this with every other woman and mom who’s ready to put their personal lives in line with truth and become part of something bigger than themselves, something that has the power to make the world a better place.

Because we can only do this together.

This is a movement, and we are so glad that you are a part of it.

If you want to learn more and dig deeper into the things I’ve been sharing with you today and over the last few weeks, I would love to see you join me this week at my free training.

I am going to walk you through why the culture has been declining and the simple and powerful steps you and your friends can take to build a solid foundation in your homes and then link arms with us to lift the culture.

The link is in the description, and I will see you there.

What if the transformation you want in your home does not start with better tactics, but with better thinking?

In this episode, Audrey Rindlisbacher sits down with Amy Updike for an honest conversation about motherhood, anger, victimhood, healing, principles, and the kind of inner growth that changes everything.

Amy shares how learning truth based principles helped her move from overwhelm and reactivity to greater peace, confidence, clarity, and self leadership.

They talk about what it means to understand first principles, how to love people without becoming permissive, how to hold boundaries without losing connection, and why learning how to think has changed Amy’s family, leadership, relationships, and home life.

If you have ever felt frustrated, emotionally reactive, discouraged in motherhood, or unsure how to move forward with confidence, this episode will give you language, hope, and a new way to think.

In this episode, you will hear about:

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Audrey Rindlisbacher: Welcome back to the Mission Driven Mom. I am Audrey Rindlisbacher, founder of the Mission Driven Mom and author of The Mission Driven Life. I have a special treat for you today. I am joined by my friend Amy Updyke, and we are going to talk about her journey over the last few years and the impact of the truths and principles that we teach and how they have had an impact in her life.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And so I am super excited for you to hear her story. We are going to start, Amy, with just telling us a little bit about yourself. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? What are some of your hobbies? You have a family. Just give us a snapshot of who Amy is.

Amy Updike: I was actually born in Germany, of all places.

Amy Updike: Oh, my dad was in the military. I am number six out of eight kids. I was mostly raised in Austin, Texas, though. And we just had a really big family, and I have got four sisters and three brothers. One of them passed away when I was really young. That is definitely a big part of my journey.

Amy Updike: My youngest brother died when I was nine, and he was four. He drowned. Wow. And that has just been a big part of family and why it is important to [00:01:00] me and my belief systems. I loved growing up in Texas. I had a beautiful experience there and met my husband in Idaho. We have been married a long time.

Amy Updike: We have got four kids. They range in age from 24 to 16 now. Nice. So I am toward the end of my parenting journey. I have learned a lot through the years.

Amy Updike: Things are changing. It is a different phase now.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: So we are now in Oregon, and I lived in the suburbs growing up, but here we live on lots of forest land in the middle of nowhere.

Amy Updike: So it is a different, wow, it is a different journey out here, and I have learned a lot living in the country and all the different challenges and fun things that go along with that. So we have raised our kids out in the middle of nowhere, in the forest in Oregon.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow. How close is your closest neighbor?

Amy Updike: About a half mile.

Amy Updike: Oh wow. So the nearest town is a little town, Banks, and it is a good 12 to 15 minute drive. But to get any real shopping, we have to go half an hour, so we drive a lot.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Oh man. Wow. And do you have quite a bit of property yourself? Is that part of it?

Amy Updike: [00:02:00] We actually live on the property that my husband’s grandpa bought.

Amy Updike: And so my kids are fourth generation on that property, and we are here taking care of his mom, and we are going to be here for quite a while. That is part of the family journey.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: What are some things that you love to do? What are some of your personal hobbies?

Amy Updike: I love to read. I have always loved to read. I love dancing. My husband and I ballroom dance.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Oh, awesome. I keep trying to drag him along to that.

Amy Updike: And I have also been a part of a clogging group.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Oh, cool.

Amy Updike: I created Dance in a Can. I also love to sing. I am part of a community choir in Oregon, and that is a big joy in my life. I am very big into homeschooling. I have started my own homeschooling group, and it has grown, and we are in our fourth year. That is a lot of fun.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: I spend a lot of time studying.

Amy Updike: And I really believe in education. I got my two year degree when my husband and I were married, and then I stopped going to school so I could support him to get his degree. And I ended up going back to school, but it took me eight years to get the last two years of schooling to get my bachelor’s, and I am pretty proud of that.

Amy Updike: I am proud [00:03:00] of the consistency that it took.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: To get that degree. So I had my bachelor’s degree. Yeah. Especially

Audrey Rindlisbacher: When you have children. Yes. One hundred percent.

Amy Updike: I started when my oldest was nine months, and I ended when my youngest was about a year old. So

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: It was quite the journey.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Let us go back a few years and talk about where you were before you found the Mission Driven Mom and what life was like for you a few years ago.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: It is fun

Amy Updike: to think about

Audrey Rindlisbacher: what you were working on, what you were struggling with, what you were looking for, and what drew you to this program.

Amy Updike: At that stage of my life, I had a lot of little people, and I was really struggling with self doubt. I was struggling with anger and trying to keep my cool. Every morning I would wake up and make a commitment to myself that I would not yell at the kids. And every morning I would wake up and make a commitment to myself to keep my cool and to be calm and to not have all these negative feelings.

Amy Updike: And I read a lot of books. I tried a lot of self help books, and they helped to some degree or another, but the intellectual knowledge did not really transfer into my daily attitude, and I [00:04:00] would do pretty well for the first couple hours, and then something would happen and I would just lose it.

Amy Updike: And it was a bad joke that when we went to school or anything, it was just normal for Mom to lose it and swear and say things that I am not proud of.

Amy Updike: And you just get to the point where you are just not proud of who you are, and you are scared of what you are doing to your kids.

Amy Updike: And I had a lot of frustration and anger toward my in laws, actually, because we were living in the same house with them, which I love. It is a blessing, but it also has its own challenges. And it was never really part of our plan. Our plan was to move up here, to have our own home. And it just was not happening.

Amy Updike: We were still with them in their home, and I felt a lot of what I have come to now know is victimhood. I did a lot of blaming and shaming and comparing and criticizing and just wallowing in poor pitiful me.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And that was really the stage I was at. I had started homeschooling, and I was loving it, but I was struggling with having them home all the time.

Amy Updike: I joke. Yeah, sure. Part of homeschooling is having your kids home with you until you get used to that. People ask, what do [00:05:00] I do? I need to homeschool. What should I do first? And I say, make sure that your home life is in order. Make sure that you have got systems and that you have rules and that you have family culture and schedules.

Amy Updike: Do not even worry about the curriculum. But I was battling all of that, trying to get that and myself in control.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And so when I discovered the Mission Driven Mom Academy, it was one of those moments where my heart told me I needed it, and I did not really know why, and I could not really afford it.

Amy Updike: And it was an introductory thing. I was thinking it was the very first year you did it. It was an introductory price. And even at that low price, it was still a sacrifice. And I am just so grateful I started it. It took me two years to complete all the content on my own.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Tell us about that journey through the Academy. What happened those first couple years?

Amy Updike: I loved the content. I loved the videos because they were short, uh huh, and succinct, but powerful, action packed. And so actually I have a lot of memories of walking or running on the treadmill while watching your videos.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Oh.

Amy Updike: And so many times it would interrupt my workout because I would have to stop and write things down. Oh, that is so good.

Amy Updike: I have to write that down. So I had a [00:06:00] lot of fun working through those videos, but I think the impact of really, truly finding out who I was was so powerful for me. Learning my strengths and getting to a point where I could love myself to the point of saying, these are my strengths, rather than saying, these are my weaknesses and always focusing on my weaknesses.

Amy Updike: I was criticizing myself for my weaknesses. Yes. Always trying to fix my weaknesses instead of embracing my strengths. Yeah. And I have come to the point where I am comfortable talking about my strengths because I am also comfortable talking about my weaknesses. And it has been a really beautiful journey going through the content and finding out what my strengths are through the StrengthsFinder, finding out what my temperaments are, what my values are, what really matters to me, and what my story is.

Amy Updike: The Cure for the Common Life story was really powerful. Going through all these impactful memories of my life and figuring out why they were meaningful and what that informed me about myself. So I got to the point where I knew who I was truly, and I knew who God was and that He loved me.

Amy Updike: And that I loved Him and that I knew what He [00:07:00] wanted for me. And by the end of that, writing my mission statement was so powerful because I have this beautiful mission statement, which incorporates so many aspects of my life and so many things, and the book is a treasure to me.

Amy Updike: My workbook is a treasure because I can open it up. And I just recently wanted to look for a job and to figure out what I would be good at. I looked through it and I said, this is what I have, and I know for sure what I am good at. I have seen it in my life. I have the kind of evidence of the test, but I also have the evidence and proof of my life.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And it has given me a lot of confidence. Also, I think the most impactful thing from this book, and I just want everyone to read it, is The Power of TED, The Empowerment Dynamic by David Emerald. It literally, and I am not exaggerating, has changed my life. I have read so many books on self help, trying to curb my anger, trying to curb my frustrations and change my behavior.

Amy Updike: But none of them did it until I read that book and I started to recognize when I am being a victim. And that simply is it. When I know I am complaining, criticizing, shaming, or comparing myself to [00:08:00] others or competing, yeah, any of those times I can immediately go, you are being a victim.

Amy Updike: And the moment I recognize that, I step back and say, okay, how can I be a creator? How can I get out of this drama triangle? How can I stop blaming everybody for persecuting me and start to change my actions, which is the only thing I can change? And that has helped with our finances.

Amy Updike: It has helped with my friendships. It has helped with my leadership roles. It has helped with my children. It has helped with my relationship with my in laws. It has helped every aspect of my life. And it has also helped with how I love myself, because many times I blame and shame myself and have got to stop and say, wait, no.

Amy Updike: Yeah. But that is not what this is about. So it has been really fun, this content. I have gone through it myself and then I went through Mission Driven Mom Level Two, learning about principles, which I have a lot to say about that. But I have also taught it. I have taught it to youth twice now. I am in my second time teaching it to youth, and it has been so joyful.

Amy Updike: We just did the lesson on subhuman and superhuman, and I finally get it the third time through. I finally understand it.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And I am able to make connections [00:09:00] to Covey’s Seven Habits and I am able to make connections to David Emerald’s drama triangle and other things that I have read to understand.

Amy Updike: What that really means. And I even had an experience this week where I put myself in subhuman. I was just down in the dumps. I had to stop and really just coach myself through the verbiage of, no, we are not going to be there. We are not going to be a victim. We are not going to whine and moan and say, it is never going to change.

Amy Updike: Yeah. We are going to look at it truthfully and just say, what can I do, and accept what I cannot change

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: and change what I can. And it really has changed not only me, but it has changed my whole family culture. And thankfully I got it at a point where I could have an influence on all of my kids.

Amy Updike: One of my boys in particular struggles with a lot of the things I struggle with. Yeah. The anger and the shame and the victimhood. And it was really fun. One time he was in a class with me, and I was teaching this, and he came home and I said something I should not have said. And he said, Mom, you are being a victim.

Amy Updike: Do not you love it when they throw it back at you?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Love when they call you out.

Amy Updike: Thank you. Thank you for that reminder. You are [00:10:00] right.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: So that is really powerful.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. Yeah. And that whole section, we do that self leadership four times, and that first section on self leadership, like learning about the types of victims in conjunction with the book and blame and shame like you keep talking about and how they all work together and all of that kind of stuff.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And then later learning to tell ourselves the truth. That is a nice cadence that makes a difference. So you feel like, I remember we were on the phone a little while ago. You said something about how you had tried therapy as well. Is that right?

Amy Updike: I have been in therapy.

Amy Updike: We were in marriage therapy for a little bit, and recently I was in therapy for some pretty traumatic family drama that happened in my nuclear family.

Amy Updike: For me, the therapy was more of triage. Yeah. Getting me out of a hole at that moment. Yeah. And this is more of an everyday life thing, how to handle the everyday life things.

Amy Updike: And then when the big things happen, you can get out of it faster and easier. I had a pretty traumatic experience a few years ago. [00:11:00] My mother was actually killed because of my father. He ran over her with his truck and he was arrested for it.

Amy Updike: And there is a lot of evidence that it was intentional. That happened almost three years ago.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow. Wow. I am so sorry, Amy.

Amy Updike: Yeah, it was pretty horrific. And I have a pretty special relationship with my parents. My dad was quite abusive, not to me so much, but very much to my mother and to my brothers and sisters to different degrees. And there is a lot of pain in memory of my dad. And so this happening just made it really bad. Yeah. Made the relationships really hard. And so when I got the call that my mom was in the hospital, I immediately flew down and I was with my mom and dad, and I was with my dad in the house.

Amy Updike: And then I would go to the hospital, and it turns out she was so damaged that we had to take her off the machines.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And my brothers and sisters flew in for the funeral, and I was there trying to navigate on the ground what was going on. And while I was there, I had some really [00:12:00] difficult but interesting experiences that showed me how much I have learned.

Amy Updike: About loving myself and loving others and loving God. And I was able to be in that situation and see the principles of it, see how much, see the good in it, see the good in my dad, and be there for my mom, but also easily forgive my siblings for their struggles because some of them chose never to speak to him again.

Amy Updike: And I completely understand, and they could not understand how I could speak to my dad. But these teachings and these skills that I have learned through the Mission Driven Mom equipped me to be able to have those tough conversations and helped me to separate myself from other people’s emotions and feelings and viewpoints to the point that I could understand them, but still hold true to what in my heart was right for me. And that has been a really powerful journey, being able to see other people’s choices in terms of principles.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: To be able to love them and still love myself and really not [00:13:00] judge.

Amy Updike: I think there is a whole conversation that could happen about what judging really is, but

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: to not condemn them for their feelings and their actions, but to understand them and love them, really felt like I was given a gift, just an incredible gift.

Amy Updike: To be able to handle that situation. Because when I got out of that situation and got home, I just collapsed and I felt the anger that my siblings felt. I felt the hurt and all of the emotions that they were feeling. But while I was there, I just felt peace and love and I was able to talk to the doctors and help with the things at home and all the things that needed to happen.

Amy Updike: I was able to do them and be clear headed because of that kind of extra gift from God and the skills I was given. They helped me through it.

Amy Updike: Principles are a second part of this journey that have completely changed the way I think.

Amy Updike: I was part of a homeschool group that I loved, with dear people, but there were some things going on that I was slowly choosing maybe were not for me, that I wanted to go a different direction.

Amy Updike: And I wanted some different styles of leadership and I wanted a different direction in education, just [00:14:00] curricula and ways to go about it.

Amy Updike: And when I was pondering what that would look like and when I should do it and how I should do it and what the structure of the school would be and all those things, the Mission Driven Mom Celebration came up and I got an email that invited me to it, and they were going to talk about principles, and I just felt the strongest pull that I needed to be there.

Amy Updike: I badly needed to be there. I did not know why, and we did not really have the finances for it, but somebody said if it is right, God will open a way. And so I just popped online and I found a ticket for a screaming deal. And I said, okay, this must be right. Wow. And so I planned and I told my husband I wanted to go, and he fully supported me, as he always does.

Amy Updike: He is awesome. And I went all the way to Texas and sat with the most incredible women and learned about principles. And it was so new to me. People use the word principle incorrectly so many times.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: They use it as opinions. They use it as their own experiences. They use it as truth, but I do not think people really understand what a principle is.

Amy Updike: And as I walked out of there, I had a lot of notes and a lot of [00:15:00] excitement and some understanding. And I started just diving right in and trying to apply what I had learned, trying to understand what principles are. I was so excited by the five questions. I was so excited by the idea that anything in my life,

Amy Updike: I could figure out what the principle is and then figure out what my personal application is. So what I ended up doing is I ended up designing my school all around principles. The very first thing we did is we made a list of what our principles were, and I double checked that. I was not really good at that yet, but I was trying to double check that they were real, make sure they were backed up by scripture.

Amy Updike: They were backed up by experience, that they really held true and they were general enough to apply in lots of different situations. So we came up with our list of principles and started there.

Amy Updike: And it was a beautiful experience because I was so concerned about making a big change like that, which undoubtedly did hurt some people.

Amy Updike: Some people had their feelings hurt because I made this choice and it shook up the structure of some things around. And I [00:16:00] hated that, but I also knew that I wanted to

Amy Updike: I wanted to make sure that what I was building was not a reaction to something. I wanted to make sure that it was not a response, that I was not going against something, but instead going for something, which is why we started on principles.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And it has been a really beautiful experience because everything has centered around those principles.

Amy Updike: And even now, four years in, one of our leadership team always stops and says, what is the principle for that? When someone comes up and has a concern or they are frustrated about something or a kid does something wrong and we want to start another rule or whatever the situation is, we always ask, what is the principle?

Amy Updike: And it allows us to go back to our core values. It allows us to go back to the reason we do things. And so many times we realize we do not need another rule for that. We just need to reinforce the principle. We need to reteach the principle, or we need to change the structure of things so that the culture is surrounding the principle better.

Amy Updike: And it really has worked. It has been such a beautiful experience, having [00:17:00] all of the structure of the school, the rules and the policies and the classes and even what classes we teach and why we teach them and what age we teach them. Everything is around these principles that we defined in the beginning.

Amy Updike: And while some people, I lost some friends over it and it really makes me very sad. They may never be as close to me as they were before. But it makes a huge difference that I know in my heart I was going toward principles and I was doing something that I was guided to do, that I wanted to do.

Amy Updike: But also it was not a reaction to anything. It was building something that was important to me. Something else I wanted to say about that.

Amy Updike: I knew in my heart that I had done something and acted in a way that was in line with my values and also was something that I felt like God approved of. I felt because we started with principles and because I did an introspection to know how I wanted to behave, how I wanted things to look, that I feel right in my heart.

Amy Updike: I have a friend that always says, sometimes you are the villain in someone else’s story. And that gives me a lot of peace. Not to say my actions have always been perfect, but my intentions [00:18:00] have been right or good. My intentions were pure. I wanted good things. And sometimes that gives us a lot of peace, just to know that I acted according to my values and that I am right with God.

Amy Updike: And then let the chips fall where they may and just hope that those relationships resolve themselves eventually. And in our day and time, that experience has given me peace in other situations that are harder, truly because in our relationships, in our families, I think most of us have someone or many people in our family who are making choices that we do not feel are right with God and we do not feel are right with principles.

Amy Updike: But seeing it that way gives us so much peace. So another example is I have a child who has made choices that are not what I would have wanted for them. But I have been able to separate my grief at the hopes and wishes dashed and my beliefs and rules and what they [00:19:00] intend and want. And in Mission Driven Mom Level Two, we learn a lot about principles and we learn about first principles, which are hard to distinguish.

Amy Updike: And it took me a long time to figure out.

Amy Updike: In fact, I think I fully understood it when I taught it to youth after I had taken the class and then I taught it, and then I was like, I think I know what I am talking about.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Teaching really is a good way to learn, for sure.

Amy Updike: But first principles are incredible because once you identify what it is, you can separate yourself from the applications.

Amy Updike: I can look at this child and say, I know their heart is wanting this. I know their heart believes this. I know this is what they are going for. And I agree with that first principle, sometimes even that principle, but that application, it diverges. And those applications many times are not good for you, are not in line with God’s law, are not something that is proven to be healthy.

Amy Updike: But I can still show compassion and love and understanding toward that child and other people in my life because I can understand where they are coming from. I can agree with them where I agree and then kindly disagree appropriately for the rest of it.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And be okay that they are living in a different way than I am living.

Amy Updike: Principles are just so powerful because we can [00:20:00] use them in every aspect of our lives. For example, you have taught so much about principles and health, for example. It is just an easier one to talk about.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: I may choose to never eat sugar again, or I may choose to have a Kit Kat bar every single night, or I may choose to only have non refined sugars, or whatever it is.

Amy Updike: And that is an application. And I do not have to judge or be angry or be frustrated or condemn or get all up in arms because somebody is choosing it differently than me.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: I can understand we both are trying to be healthier.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: That we both agree that limiting sugar is a good thing.

Amy Updike: That is way easier. It is a simple topic than some of the other ones we could talk about. But that has given me so much love for other people and it allows me to be kind and allows me not to get upset. Whereas before I understood these things, and like I mentioned earlier, I struggled so much with being angry.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And this has allowed me not to be angry about it because I can pause and say, wait a second, am I being a victim? Am I in the wrong? I can pause and say, are they living this principle in a different way than I choose to live it? And whether I agree or not, I can still have compassion and love for them.

Amy Updike: And that [00:21:00] has changed all my relationships in my life.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow. Wow. That is incredible. You were just making me think about how I feel like in the world, we are told that in order to really love, in order to really show empathy and compassion, we need to be permissive. And you are saying something very different than that, but on the surface, sometimes it can look similar.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And that is why when we can think in terms of the natural law framework and really have a handle on it, because what you are saying is that because you can build bridges with people on first principles upon which you agree, then you can honor the intention.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And you can see that in their own way, they are trying to be a principled person, but they are confused about maybe which principles follow because they do not have these thinking skills, or their applications are not what they ought to be or are wreaking havoc or whatever.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And so it gives you tools to parse all that out and to discern so much more clearly the difference between being permissive [00:22:00] and continuing to do actions of love for whoever it is, regardless of what choices they are making, without compromising what you know to be true, without compromising the principles you are striving to live and the values that you hold dear.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Because you can let go of their specific daily choices and it, I do not know, somehow. And I guess you and I just have this shared language so we can understand each other and it might be a little harder for the audience to understand until they get there, but it is so liberating to be able to say, I know that at any moment that you choose to step back into principles, your life can course correct.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And until you hit up against life enough times, then maybe you need to learn that way. And that is perfectly fine. I am still going to love you and be here for you, but I do not have to affirm that I love everything that you are doing. I do not have to approve of all of your choices. I can recognize that they might not be principled, but I can see, I can differentiate you from your choices.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And anyway, parsing all of that out, understanding it more clearly, seeing it [00:23:00] for what it is is so much easier.

Amy Updike: You are right. It does on the surface sound like the phrase, you do you.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: It does. And as you were talking, I was pondering the difference. And I think the difference mostly is in the approach and in my heart.

Amy Updike: The book Anatomy of Peace teaches about getting your heart in a heart of peace, not a heart of war.

Amy Updike: And this allows me to be in a heart of peace, and I will give you an extension to this story. Just recently for the holidays, this child was home and opened up their heart to me about a significant change in their life that they were going to be making.

Amy Updike: Something that maybe five years ago would have devastated me.

Amy Updike: And do not get me wrong, I do not agree with it. I am saddened by it.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: But because he knew I loved him.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Because he knew my heart was at peace toward him. And for clarification, this is a child who is older and out of the house.

Amy Updike: Yeah. He is an adult.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And making these choices. It is a different situation when they are in your home.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: But this conversation went really well, and it went well because I was able to talk in terms of my beliefs.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: [00:24:00] And my principles.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And how much I loved him.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And the things that would be acceptable and allowed in my home and things that would not be, and the conversation went so well because he was able to say, yes. I hear you. I respect you because I respected him too. I think that is the difference.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Boundaries were not taken away. There were still things that I made very clear that I would not pay for nor support.

Amy Updike: In public nor would I allow in my home.

Amy Updike: And he understood that.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: But also it was a good conversation because he also understood that I was not taking away his choice. That I was understanding where he was coming from, that I was hearing him and respecting his experience and his reasonings.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: So it is tricky and it is tender when it is somebody that is

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Oh yeah.

Amy Updike: that close to you. But it is not a you do you thing. It is more of an open up your heart so you can share when the time is appropriate.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: When they are ready to listen. And that will never come if I just come down with [00:25:00] only my application rules, my home, my rules.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Or this is where the line is. You cannot cross it. So these principles and this thinking, as you can see, have really changed the way I behave toward even those closest to me.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: That I do not feel like I have compromised on what is allowed in my home or what is acceptable or what I will do because it is boundaries.

Amy Updike: Yeah. Yeah. What I will do.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: You do not have to pretend to be someone else, or you do not have to relax your own values and your own standards, and you do not have to pretend like you approve, but yet the relationship stays strong and loving and close and clearly there is enough trust that he feels like he can talk to you and be open and honest with you.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Because why? Because he wants to stay in your life. He does not want to write you off because he knows he is loved and you have been able to build that between the two of you. So that is really incredible.

Amy Updike: Yeah. I just hope it continues. I hope I can keep acting in a way that he feels loved.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. So tell me where you are today in terms, especially, you have mentioned, you have thrown out some words, you have said some things, but give us a [00:26:00] picture of just some words or phrases or sentences that might describe, before you talked about someone who was angry, resentful, victim mindset, troubled, overwhelmed, frustrated. And who is Amy now?

Amy Updike: I feel confident. I feel at peace. Sure, I still have rough days occasionally, but I feel self assured because I know I truly do know who I am and I know what my values are and I know what God wants from me and what His laws are. And I just love the phrase, we are practicing principles.

Amy Updike: Because that is exactly what we are doing. Even a couple days ago, a situation happened where I was thrown right into victimhood. I was right into, oh, this is never going to change, and I am so frustrated. But I was able to get out of it really quickly. Yes. And even though sometimes those emotions still stay, I can keep self checking, going, nope.

Amy Updike: What can I do today? I can go on a walk. What can I do today? I can take a breath and assure myself that it can be, it is going to be all right. Because I am not in control of everything, but I am in control of me. I am in control of how I feel. I am in control of, control is the [00:27:00] right word, but I can choose my thoughts.

Amy Updike: I can choose to rephrase things. I choose to kind of feel

Audrey Rindlisbacher: It does not

Amy Updike: Yeah.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: It does feel like you are in control because you are living intentionally and you are determining who you are going to be today. How are you going to show up today?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: We talk about this in the Academy quite a bit, that we can choose to entertain certain thoughts and the thoughts that we entertain determine the emotions that we feel. And that is at least part of the equation that I hear you saying, is that you have retrained the way that you think through the lens of principles, but through other tools as well.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And now you are making, you are living much more intentionally from that tiny seed of thought choice all the way through to these hard conversations that you are having with your family. And that does make you feel more in control. Because you talked about before how you would wake up and make a commitment to yourself that you were not going to get angry and you were not going to do this or that.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And yet so often, several years ago, you would give in [00:28:00] to that anger because you did not have the tools, you did not have the principles, you did not have a better plan. You did not understand what was at the root of it. There is a really famous quote, I think it is Henry David Thoreau, that I love a lot but have been using a lot lately.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: He says, for every thousand that are hacking at the branches of evil, or the leaves of evil, something like that, there is only one hacking at the root. And that is something that I really wanted the MDM Academy to give moms, was to get to the root. Why, these are all of the symptoms. This is the environment. This is what I am swimming in. But what is really at the heart of that?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And in all of those self leadership sections, those titles of those sections are increasing my personal power. Would you say that you feel more powerful now? That would be a term you would use for yourself?

Amy Updike: Absolutely.

Amy Updike: And I love that idea of hitting at the roots because, like I mentioned before, I have spent so much time reading self help books and I have gone to therapy about different issues in my life, and they would help,

Amy Updike: Covey talks about the [00:29:00] personality versus the character ethic.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And I felt like I spent so much time just trying to do the things that would fix it. So many times trying to find that one skill that would change it.

Amy Updike: And sure, those techniques do make a difference on the surface, but it does not change the root, the core problem. And in me, the core problem was a feeling of insecurity, a feeling of not being of value. It stems from some childhood trauma. It stems from just different beliefs about myself. But recognizing who I really am has changed it all.

Amy Updike: And recognizing my power to have influence over my family, which sounds power hungry. It is not. But the creator mindset that I can create a home of peace and not just do it out of, okay, I am going to count to ten, which is a good skill. But is it not better when you stop and say, okay, why am I angry?

Amy Updike: I am angry because I am embarrassed that this child is going out in public looking this way, and they do not have their shoes on. So rather than freaking out that they do not have their shoes on and screaming at them, I can stop and recognize this is about me.

Amy Updike: This is [00:30:00] about

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yes.

Amy Updike: me feeling embarrassed.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: So often, almost all the time, there is something that you can do.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yes.

Amy Updike: Just changing that dialogue in your head makes all the difference in the world to actually what comes out. So many of these skills really have changed my behavior and changed how I think and who I am, my character. And it is not just the videos and the quizzes, which are great, and I have learned a lot from them, absolutely.

Amy Updike: I have also just loved diving deep into all of the classics and how every book I read now I can find a principle in it and I can find a way to bring it into my heart and recognize truths or untruths.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Principles are so fun once you start to recognize them because you see them in movies and it starts to spoil movies for you and you see them in, sorry, sun is coming in.

Amy Updike: Hey baby. Sorry, I am in a recorded interview, so I am going to wait for you to leave the room and then I am going to finish what I am going to say.

Amy Updike: Okay. What was I saying?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: How you can find principles as you read books and you can find them in movies and other things like that.

Amy Updike: So looking for principles in these books and movies is so fun. And I also have [00:31:00] found that I can look for principles or broken principles in the ballot when I am voting.

Amy Updike: And that has changed the way I vote. It has changed the way I look at articles or things that are going on in the Supreme Court or things that are going on in current events. I can look back and say, okay, what is the principle? What is this person really arguing? What is this person really thinking?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Is there something we can agree on? And where? It has just created so much peace in my life that I do not fly off on the winds of whatever crazy thing is happening. And things happen all the time in the world and in my home. So it just allows me to have way more peace and confidence and control and love.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: That is beautiful. We have this training coming up, which everyone listening, I would love to invite you to come. I would love to have you there. And we are talking about how to stop feeling powerless and become the expert in your own life. And that means exactly what you are talking about, Amy, that you can go to other experts, you can read, go to the doctor, see a therapist, look up someone who is running for office, a candidate.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And at the end of the day, [00:32:00] trust that your discernment, that the principles you have discovered, that your decisions about what all these other people are, all this advice that people are giving you, is that you can trust yourself to make those decisions, that you can trust yourself to be the expert about how you ought to move forward.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: I heard a lot of that when you were talking about losing friendships as you tried to be principled. That just requires so much conviction and confidence and discernment, I think, to be able to say, this is the truth and I am going to stand on the truth. And I am sorry if you do not want to come there with me.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And that is unfortunate and I will miss you. But that is who I am going to be, that is what I am going to do.

Amy Updike: I feel like I want to clarify that experience a bit. It was also really, in the experience of choosing to start a new school and knowing that would hurt some people, the old school that I left, it was really important to me to recognize that they also were operating off of really good, wonderful principles.

Amy Updike: And I understood what those principles were.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And it enabled me to think about how I could do things differently and [00:33:00] yet recognize that we both were coming from a really good place and love and support them. And I have done my very best to support that school

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: and all of those families.

Amy Updike: And even though it personally pricked when a family would choose them over our school

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Sure.

Amy Updike: and still do, there is still a lot of shuffling going on, even though that happens, I still never react unkindly about it. I always am supportive because I at my heart understand even if someone chooses not to go to school at all and go back to public school, or they want to choose a charter school, I support them because the principle is that we as parents have the right to choose what our children, what education they get and how they are educated. We have that right.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And who am I to criticize or take away that truth from them? Yeah. And it is all good. We all should educate our children and each child needs something different and sometimes at different times in their lives.

Amy Updike: So just understanding that principle and understanding that it is the application that differs changed my heart completely about it. And do not get me wrong, yet it pricked [00:34:00] sometimes.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Sure.

Amy Updike: Just like I am sure it pricked for them when I made choices.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Sure.

Amy Updike: But would it not be great if we all saw things that way and we said, okay, that is a different application.

Amy Updike: I can support you in what you are doing and love you for what you are doing and not have it be all about me because it is not about me.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: It is about all of us trying to live the principles in the best application that works for our family at that time.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. Yeah. That is awesome. Agree one hundred percent.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: So is there anything else that you would like to say to anyone listening? What would your advice be to moms that are out there thinking about joining the program or just wanting to navigate their lives better?

Amy Updike: I think I would say that there is nothing more important than what we are doing in our own homes and in our own hearts, and we need to make an investment into ourselves and into our families. And sometimes it takes a really big sacrifice, and it might feel like a big sacrifice, to commit to a program like this or do anything that you are doing to better yourself.

Amy Updike: But there is nothing more important than what we do, than finding a way to improve our relationships, than finding peace in our hearts, than understanding how to [00:35:00] navigate this terrifying world. And right now we need it more than ever. I am so grateful that I was exposed to this so long ago so that I had the skills to prepare me for when I really needed it the most.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: The last few years have brought some rough challenges. The passing of my mom and the way it happened was very difficult, to say the least. And having a child that is choosing something different than you ever dreamed for them is hard, and trying to love and understand them. And then I look around and I see so many people just ripped apart in their social groups, even in church, in their families, by the schism that is happening politically and all of the really difficult things that are happening and probably will keep happening.

Amy Updike: And to be able to be secure in what you believe, to be able to be secure in how you act, and you have consciously chosen what that should be and you have practiced it and you are working on it and you are training yourself to respond in a respectful, loving way, who does that anymore? That can change everything.

Amy Updike: It [00:36:00] can change everything in your life. And it has, for me. It has made some of these experiences that could have been almost irreparable not just bearable, but some of my relationships are even stronger after.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow.

Amy Updike: Because of knowing who I am, knowing what God’s will is, and knowing what the principles are in any of these situations, or that I know how to find a principle. It is a skill that gives me so much peace and confidence.

Amy Updike: And I just would hope that women would recognize their power, that we have influence over so many people. And because of this I am now at a stage that not only am I secure in myself and my family is operating well enough, I am working on that. But not only that, but I have been able to turn my focus outward to the community without sacrificing what is going on in my home.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: As we learn about in the Mission Driven Mom, so many times people turn outward first before they have their hearts and their lives in order. And it has been really beautiful being able to affect so many families in our community.

Amy Updike: [00:37:00] And, I humbly

Amy Updike: families will come to me and say, I cannot believe how you do this. How do you do so much? How do you run this school? How did you start the school?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And first of all, I did not do it alone at all. It was a team. But it was because I was able to start with principles. I was able to start with

Amy Updike: A vision of what I wanted. And I was able to use those principles to gather people around me who wanted the same thing. And we have been able to make a really big impact in our little corner of the world. And that is all that matters. Yeah. I never will be known in the world and I do not care.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. I,

Amy Updike: as long as my friends and family and those people that I am in contact with are bettered because of my influence and that my life is better because of the principles I am choosing, what more matters?

Amy Updike: I love the opportunity to be able to have an impact on others.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And to be able to create a community that heals families and gives support and is a place that is safe for faith and a place that people learn and love. And it has been life changing to be able to see these kids.

Amy Updike: We have incorporated the five questions into some of our classes, [00:38:00] and they are getting there faster than I was. It has been beautiful to watch them go through the Academy and the changes that happen in their families because they are having an impact on their parents.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow.

Amy Updike: I just wish, I wish that parents and families would recognize the power of doing both, of having the Mission Driven Mom in their home, but also having the Mission Driven Teen in their home because that has changed my kids quite a bit.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Especially this one child I talked about that has made different choices. Even still, I can see him using those skills that we talked about years ago. I can see him stopping and trying to rephrase it and trying to see my point of view.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow.

Amy Updike: It has been really powerful. So even though he has made different choices, these skills still have bettered our relationship and bettered our home life.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow.

Amy Updike: So that has been really beautiful too. So I would encourage families to find it in their hearts to do both, to allow the kids this opportunity to change, but also how much more quickly can the culture of the family change? How much faster can we all practice the skills and get better if we are all learning it together?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: So that has been really fun to see, [00:39:00] families grow in character and grow in their relationships.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And in their confidence and peace.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. Wow. Wow.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: I want to ask you one last question just because on the back of the book, The Mission Driven Life, one of the things that is on there is it talks about how I was searching out these great men and women that really I admired and I wanted to be like them.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And I was trying to crack the code of how they became those kinds of people. And these seven laws of life mission were the pathway for ordinary people to do extraordinary things. And I know that when women listen to someone like you and you are so polished and beautiful and professional and you are doing big things, that maybe they just cannot imagine ever getting to the point where you are.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: I am just wondering, was there a time in your past when the person that you are now and the things that you do now and the influence that you make in your community would have felt impossible for you, that you would have never imagined that you could do the things that you do [00:40:00] now?

Amy Updike: Absolutely. In fact, I have a dear friend who, I think it was the very first year I started homeschooling, she looked at me and said, you are going to have your own school one day.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow.

Amy Updike: And I went, what are you talking about? I am just trying to get the kids out the door and teach my one class. What are you talking about?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And she has a gift for seeing the

Audrey Rindlisbacher: the

Amy Updike: potential in other people. But at that moment I was just thinking I can barely keep my dishes done. I am just trying not to scream at my kids in the morning and not use expletives trying to get them in the car.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Oh, we can laugh now, but it was not funny then.

Amy Updike: And I would cry the whole way there because I am like, I cannot believe what I just said.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Oh.

Amy Updike: But yeah, it is a growing process and so many people will say, I do not know how you homeschool. Like how do you do that?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: I could never do that.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: We can do way more than we think we can.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yes.

Amy Updike: And it is one baby step at a time. I just remember going to Walmart with four little kids and somebody looking at me going, how do you do that? I can barely handle the one. And I said, they do not come all at once.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: You grow with it.

Amy Updike: Grow

Audrey Rindlisbacher: into it. Yep. You grow,

Amy Updike: your capacity grows.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yes.

Amy Updike: And you learn so much through [00:41:00] every experience. Every hard experience has taught me so much.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And so every little baby step, and as long as we are practicing principles and as long as we are just striving, being self aware and just striving to be a little bit better, it does not even have to be every day. We take steps back, but just over time.

Amy Updike: Yeah. As long as the trajectory is that we are able to do a little bit more each time, it is pretty incredible. And I bet you think that too. I look at you and I am just like, oh, how do you do what you do so much and raise your family?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. I just want women that are listening to know that if you are in that place where you are like, I never could, just do not sell yourself short. It is just not true. You just do not know what you can do with the right tools, the right guidance, the right mentors, the right women around you,

Amy Updike: Yeah.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: and the right support systems and all of that kind of thing. Amy, you are amazing. I really am honored that you would come on today and share your story with us and be so honest and vulnerable and really think you are just such an amazing woman.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: So grateful for you and for all that you do and the influence that you have and everything that you have shared today. And so for those listening, [00:42:00] if you want to understand better the kinds of things that Amy has been talking about and understand how you could become more of an expert in your own life and what this thing called principles is and how they work and why they matter and how they could change your life, then I would invite you to click on the link in the description and register for this training that I am going to do.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And we are going to spend just an hour and a half together and I am going to walk you through some things that will get you jump started on this path and you will be able to start doing some of the things that Amy is talking about and have a window into how you really can become so much more than you think you can.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: How you can solve your problems with truth, how the truth really will make you free. And more than that, you can learn who you really are and walk with confidence. Look at the kind of example that Amy is to her family and the confidence and conviction that she shows them. We are the heartbeat of the home and we represent motherhood and womanhood and adulthood.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And our example is everything. It is everything. And there is just [00:43:00] no reason to wait one more day to learn how to overcome whatever is in your way and move forward. Be more of that example that you would want to be. So I would invite you to join us for that training that is coming up soon. I would love to see you there.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And Amy, thank you again for being here with us. You are incredible and I wish you and your school and your community and your family all the best and hope you continue to grow and have more success in the future.

Amy Updike: Thank you so much. You are too kind. I do not feel like I am that great, but I really appreciate it.

Amy Updike: We were in marriage therapy for a little bit and recently I was in therapy for some pretty traumatic family drama that happened in my nuclear family. What did you want to know about that?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Oh, I just thought that I had understood that you said that this had helped where therapy had not helped, but maybe that was my, maybe I misunderstood that.

Amy Updike: No, I would not agree with that.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Oh, okay.

Amy Updike: I think therapy taught skills too.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: But this was definitely more life changing, I think.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: For me, the therapy was more of triage.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Getting me out of a hole at that moment.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And this is more of everyday life things, how to handle the everyday life things.

Amy Updike: And then when the big things happen, you can get out of it faster and easier. I am not sure how much you

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: want to hear about this, but I had a pretty traumatic experience a few years ago. My mother was actually killed because of my father. He ran over her with his truck and he was arrested for it.

Amy Updike: And there is a lot of evidence that it was intentional. That happened almost three years ago.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: How many years ago?

Amy Updike: Almost three. It was in March.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow. Wow. I am so sorry, Amy.

Amy Updike: Yeah, it was pretty horrific. And I have a pretty special relationship with my parents. My dad was quite abusive and he, not to me so much, but very much to my mother and to my brothers and sisters to different degrees. And there is a lot of pain in memory of my dad. And so this happening made, it just made it really bad.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Made the relationships really hard. And so when I got the call that my mom was in the hospital, I immediately flew down and I was with my mom and dad, and I was with my dad in the house.

Amy Updike: And then I would go to the hospital and it turns out she was so damaged that we had to, we had to take her off the machines.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And my brothers and sisters flew in for the funeral and I was there trying to navigate on the ground what was going on. And while I was there I had some really difficult but interesting experiences that showed me how much I have learned.

Amy Updike: About loving myself and loving others and loving God. And I was able to be in that situation and see the principles of it, see how much, see the good in it, see the good in my dad and be there for my mom, but also easily forgive my siblings for their struggles because some of them chose never to speak to him again.

Amy Updike: And I completely understand and they could not understand how I could speak to my dad. But these teachings and these skills that I have learned through the Mission Driven Mom equipped me to be able to have those tough communication, wow, those tough conversations and helped me to separate myself from other people’s emotions and feelings and viewpoints to the point that I could understand them, but still hold true to what in my heart was right for me. And that has been a really powerful journey, being able to see other people’s choices in terms of principles.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: To be able to love them and still love myself and really not judge.

Amy Updike: I think there is, that term is, there is a whole conversation that could happen about what judging really is, but yeah.

Amy Updike: But to not condemn them for their feelings and their actions, but to understand them and love them. So I really feel like I was given, just between you and me, I really feel like I was given a gift, just an incredible gift.

Amy Updike: To be able to handle that situation. Because when I got out of that situation and got home, I just collapsed and I felt the anger that my siblings felt, I felt the hurt and all of the emotions that they were feeling. But while I was there, I just felt peace and love and I was able to talk to the doctors and help with the things at home and all the things that needed to happen.

Amy Updike: I was able to do them and be clearheaded because of that kind of extra gift from God and the skills I was given. They helped me through it.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow. I am so sorry. That is, do you want us to use any of that or do you want us to cut that part?

Amy Updike: Whatever you feel like is appropriate. I am okay with it.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Okay.

Amy Updike: I have never been shy about sharing it. And that is, it is part of the weird journey of recognizing that he made a huge mistake and loving him, but not allowing him to hide from it.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow.

Amy Updike: It is a strange duality that I am dealing with.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. Wow. Wow. That is incredible. So tell me a little bit more about the principles part. What does that mean to you? What difference does that make in how you live your life? Or just talk about that for a minute.

Amy Updike: Principles are a second part of this journey that have completely changed the way I think.

Amy Updike: I was part of a homeschool group that I loved with dear people, but there were some things going on that I was slowly choosing maybe were not for me, that I wanted to go a different direction.

Amy Updike: And I wanted some different styles of leadership and I wanted a different direction in education, just curriculum and ways to go about it.

Amy Updike: And when I was pondering what that would look like and when I should do it and how I should do it and what the structure of the school would be and all those things, the Mission Driven Mom Celebration came up and I got an email that invited me to it, and they were going to talk about principles, and I just felt the strongest pull that I needed to be there.

Amy Updike: I badly needed to be there. I did not know why, and we did not really have the finances for it, but somebody said if it is right, God will open a way. And so I just popped online and I found a ticket for a screaming deal. And I said, okay, this must be right.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow.

Amy Updike: And so I planned and I told my husband I wanted to go, and he fully supported me as he always does.

Amy Updike: He is awesome. And I went all the way to Texas and sat with the most incredible women and learned about principles. And it was so new to me. People use the word principle incorrectly so many times.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: They use it as opinions. They use it as their own experiences. They use it as truth, but they do not, I do not think people really understand what a principle is.

Amy Updike: And as I walked out of there, I had a lot of notes and a lot of excitement and some understanding. And I started just diving right in and trying to apply what I had learned, trying to understand what principles are. I was so excited by the five questions. I was so excited by the idea that anything in my life,

Amy Updike: I could figure out what the principle is and then figure out what my personal application is. So what I ended up doing is I ended up designing my school all around principles. The very first thing we did is we made a list of what our principles were, and I double checked that. I was not really good at that yet, but I was trying to double check that they were real, make sure they were backed up by scripture.

Amy Updike: They were backed up by experience, that they really held true and they were vague enough or less detailed enough to apply in lots of different situations. So we came up with our list of principles and started there.

Amy Updike: And it was a beautiful experience because I was so concerned about making a big change like that, which undoubtedly did hurt some people.

Amy Updike: Some people had their feelings hurt because I made this choice and it shook up the structure of some things around. And I hated that, but I also knew that I wanted to

Amy Updike: I wanted to make sure that what I was building was not a reaction to something. I wanted to make sure that it was not a response, that I was not going against something, but instead going for something, which is why we started on principles.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And it has been a really beautiful experience because everything has centered around those principles.

Amy Updike: And even now, four years in, one of our leadership team always stops and says, what is the principle for that? When someone comes up and has a concern or they are frustrated about something or a kid does something wrong and we want to start another rule or whatever situation comes up, we always ask, what is the principle?

Amy Updike: And it allows us to go back to our core values. It allows us to go back to the reason we do things. And so many times we realize we do not need another rule for that. We just need to reinforce the principle. We need to reteach the principle, or we need to change the structure of things so that the culture is surrounding the principle better.

Amy Updike: And it really has worked. It has been such a beautiful experience. Having all of the structure of the school, the rules and the policies and the classes and even what classes we teach and why we teach them and what age we teach them. Everything is around these principles that we have defined in the beginning.

Amy Updike: And while some people, I lost some friends over it and it really makes me very sad. They may never be as close to me as they were before. But it makes a huge difference that I know in my heart I was going toward principles and I was doing something that I was guided to do, that I wanted to do.

Amy Updike: But also it was not a reaction to anything. It was building something that was important to me. Something else I wanted to say about that.

Amy Updike: I knew in my heart that I had done something and acted in a way that was in line with my values and also was something that I felt like God approved of. I felt because we started with principles and because I did an introspection to know how I wanted to behave, how I wanted things to look, that I feel right in my heart.

Amy Updike: I have a friend that always says, sometimes you are the villain in someone else’s story. And that gives me a lot of peace. Not to say my actions have always been perfect, but my intentions have been right or good. My intentions were pure. I wanted good things. And sometimes that gives us a lot of peace just to know that I acted according to my values and that I am right with God.

Amy Updike: And then let the chips fall where they may and just hope that those relationships resolve themselves eventually. And in our day and time, that experience has given me peace in other situations that are harder, truly because in our relationships, in our families, I think most of us have someone or many people in our family who are making choices that we do not feel are right with God and we do not feel are right with principles.

Amy Updike: But seeing it that way gives us so much peace. So another example is I have a child who has made choices that are not what I would have wanted for them. But I have been able to separate my grief at the hopes and wishes dashed and my beliefs and rules and what they intend and want. And in the Mission Driven Mom Level Two, we learn a lot about principles and we learn about first principles, which are hard to distinguish.

Amy Updike: And it took me a long time to figure out.

Amy Updike: In fact, I think I fully understood it when I taught it to youth after I had taken the class and then I taught it, and then I was like, I think I know what I am talking about.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Teaching really is a good way to learn, for sure.

Amy Updike: But first principles are incredible because once you identify what it is, you can separate yourself from the applications.

Amy Updike: I can look at this child and say, I know their heart is wanting this. I know their heart believes this. I know this is what they are going for. And I agree with that first principle. Sometimes even that principle, but that application, it diverges. And those applications many times are not good for you, are not in line with God’s law, are not something that is proven to be healthy.

Amy Updike: But I can still show compassion and love and understanding toward that child and other people in my life because I can understand where they are coming from. I can agree with them where I agree and then kindly disagree appropriately for the rest of it.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And be okay that they are living in a different way than I am living.

Amy Updike: Principles are just so powerful because we can use them in every aspect of our lives. For example, you have taught so much about principles and health, for example. It is just an easier one to talk about.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: I may choose to never eat sugar again, or I may choose to have a Kit Kat bar every single night, or I may choose to only have non refined sugars, or whatever it is.

Amy Updike: And that is an application. And I do not have to judge or be angry or be frustrated or condemn or get all up in arms because somebody is choosing it differently than me.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: I can understand we both are trying to be healthier.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: That we both agree that limiting sugar is a good thing.

Amy Updike: That is way easier. It is a simple topic than some of the other ones we could talk about. But that has given me so much love for other people and it allows me to be kind and allows me not to get upset. Whereas before I understood these things, and like I mentioned earlier I struggled so much with being angry.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And this has allowed me not to be angry about it because I can pause and say, wait a second, am I being a victim? Am I in the wrong? I can pause and say, are they living this principle in a different way than I choose to live it? And whether I agree or not, I can still have compassion and love for them.

Amy Updike: And that has changed all my relationships in my life.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow. Wow. That is incredible. You were just making me think about how I feel like in the world, we are told that in order to really love, in order to really show empathy and compassion, we need to be permissive. And you are saying something very different than that, but on the surface, sometimes it can look similar.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And that is why when we can think in terms of the natural law framework and really have a handle on it. Because what you are saying is that because you can build bridges with people on

Audrey Rindlisbacher: First principles upon which you agree, then you can honor the intention. And you can see that in their own way, they are trying to be a principled person, but they are confused about maybe which principles follow because they do not have these thinking skills, or their applications are not what they ought to be or are wreaking havoc or whatever.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And so it gives you tools to parse all that out and to discern so much more clearly the difference between being permissive and continuing to do actions of love for whoever it is, regardless of what choices they are making, without compromising what you know to be true, without compromising the principles you are striving to live and the values that you hold dear.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Because you can let go of their specific daily choices and it, I do not know, somehow. And I guess you and I just have this shared language so we can understand each other and it might be a little harder for the audience to understand until they get there, but it is so liberating to be able to say, I know that at any moment that you choose to step back into principles, your life can course correct.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And until you hit up against life enough times, then maybe you need to learn that way. And that is perfectly fine. I am still going to love you and be here for you, but I do not have to affirm that I love everything that you are doing. I do not have to approve of all of your choices. I can recognize that they might not be principled, but I can see, I can differentiate you from your choices.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And anyway, parsing all of that out, understanding it more clearly, seeing it for what it is is so much easier.

Amy Updike: You are right. It does on the surface sound like the phrase, you do you.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: It does. And as you were talking, I was pondering the difference. And I think the difference mostly is in the approach and in my heart.

Amy Updike: The book Anatomy of Peace teaches about getting your heart in a heart of peace, not a heart of war.

Amy Updike: And this allows me to be in a heart of peace, and I will give you an extension to this story. Just recently for the holidays, this child was home and opened up their heart to me about a significant change in their life that they were going to be making.

Amy Updike: Something that maybe five years ago would have devastated me.

Amy Updike: And do not get me wrong, I do not agree with it. I am saddened by it.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: But because he knew I loved him.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Because he knew my heart was at peace toward him. And for clarification, this is a child who is older and out of the house.

Amy Updike: Yeah. He is an adult.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And making these choices. It is a different situation when they are in your home.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: But this conversation went really well, and it went well because I was able to talk in terms of my beliefs.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And my principles.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And how much I loved him.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And the things that would be acceptable and allowed in my home and things that would not be, and the conversation went so well because he was able to say, yes. I hear you. I respect you because I respected him too. I think that is the difference.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Boundaries were not taken away. There were still things that I have made very clear that I would not pay for nor support.

Amy Updike: In public nor would I allow in my home.

Amy Updike: And he understood that.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: But also it was a good conversation because he also understood that I was not taking away his choice. That I was understanding where he was coming from, that I was hearing him and respecting his experience and his reasonings.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: So it is tricky and it is tender. Yeah. When it is somebody that is

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Oh yeah.

Amy Updike: that close to you. But it is not a you do you thing. It is more of an open up your heart so you can share when the time is appropriate.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: When they are ready to listen. And that will never come if I just came down with only my application rules, my home, my rules.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Or this is where the line is. You cannot cross it. So these principles and this thinking, as you can see, have really changed the way I behave toward even those closest to me.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: That I do not feel like I have compromised on what is allowed in my home or what is acceptable or what I will do because it is boundaries.

Amy Updike: Yeah. Yeah. What I will do.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: You do not have to pretend to be someone else, or you do not have to relax your own values and your own standards, and you do not have to pretend like you approve, but yet the relationship stays strong and loving and close and clearly there is enough trust that he feels like he can talk to you and be open and honest with you.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Because why? Because he wants to stay in your life. He does not want to write you off because he knows he is loved and you have been able to build that between the two of you. So that is really incredible.

Amy Updike: Yeah. I just hope it continues. I hope I can keep acting in a way that he feels loved.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. So tell me where you are today in terms, especially, you have mentioned, you have thrown out some words, you have said some things, but give us a picture with just some words or phrases or sentences that might describe. Before, you talked about someone who was angry, resentful, in a victim mindset, troubled, overwhelmed, frustrated. And who is Amy now?

Amy Updike: I feel confident. I feel at peace. Sure, I still have rough days occasionally, but I feel self assured because I know, I truly do know, who I am and I know what my values are and I know what God wants from me and what His laws are. And I just love the phrase, we are practicing principles.

Amy Updike: Because that is exactly what we are doing. Even a couple days ago, a situation happened where I was thrown right into victimhood. I was right into, oh, this is never going to change, and I am so frustrated. But I was able to get out of it really quickly.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yes.

Amy Updike: And even though sometimes those emotions still stay, I can keep self checking, going, nope. What can I do today? I can go on a walk. What can I do today? I can take a breath and assure myself that it is going to be all right. Because I am not in control of everything, but I am in control of me. I am in control of how I feel. I am in control of, control is the right word, but I can choose my thoughts.

Amy Updike: I can choose to rephrase things. I choose to feel

Audrey Rindlisbacher: It does not, does it?

Amy Updike: Yeah.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: It does feel like you are in control because you are living intentionally and you are determining who you are going to be today. How are you going to show up today?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: We talk about this in the Academy quite a bit, that we can choose to entertain certain thoughts and the thoughts that we entertain determine the emotions that we feel. And that is at least part of the equation that I hear you saying, is that you have retrained the way that you think through the lens of principles, but through other tools as well.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And now you are living much more intentionally from that tiny seed of thought choice all the way through to these hard conversations that you are having with your family. And that does make you feel more in control. Because you talked about before how you would wake up and make a commitment to yourself that you were not going to get angry and you were not going to do this or that.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And yet so often, several years ago, you would give in to that anger because you did not have the tools, you did not have the principles, you did not have a better plan. You did not understand what was at the root of it. There is a really famous quote, I think it is Henry David Thoreau, that I love a lot and have been using a lot lately.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: He says, for every thousand that are hacking at the branches of evil or the leaves of evil, something like that, there is only one hacking at the root. And that is something that I really wanted the MDM Academy to give moms, was to get to the root. These are all of the symptoms. This is the environment. This is what I am swimming in. But what is really at the heart of that?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And in all of those self leadership sections, the titles of those sections are increasing my personal power. Would you say that you feel more powerful now? Would that be a term you would use for yourself?

Amy Updike: Absolutely.

Amy Updike: And I love that idea of hitting at the roots, because like I mentioned before, I have spent so much time reading self help books and I have gone to therapy about different issues in my life, and they, it was more like they would help. Oh, what does Covey call it? He calls it the behaviors

Audrey Rindlisbacher: The quadrant? No, like the behaviors versus the internal team personality and

Amy Updike: character ethic.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: So Covey talks about the personality

Amy Updike: versus the

Audrey Rindlisbacher: character ethic. You just said it.

Amy Updike: Okay. So Covey talks about the personality versus the character ethic.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And I felt like I spent so much time just trying to do the things that would fix it.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: So many times trying to find that one skill that would change it.

Amy Updike: And sure, those techniques do make a difference on the surface, but it does not change the root, the core problem. And in me, the core problem was a feeling of insecurity, a feeling of not being of value. It stems from some childhood trauma. It stems from just different beliefs about myself. But recognizing who I really am has changed it all.

Amy Updike: And recognizing my power to have influence over my family, which sounds power hungry. It is not. But the creator mindset, that I can create a home of peace and not just do it out of, okay, I am going to count to 10, which is a good skill. It is a good skill. But is it not better when you stop and say, okay, why am I angry?

Amy Updike: I am angry because I am embarrassed that this child is going out in public looking this way, and they do not have their shoes on. So rather than freaking out that they do not have their shoes on and screaming at them, I can stop and recognize this is about me.

Amy Updike: This is about

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yes.

Amy Updike: me feeling embarrassed.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: So often, almost all the time, there is something that you can do.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yes.

Amy Updike: Just changing that dialogue in your head makes all the difference in the world to actually what comes out. So many of these skills really have changed my behavior and changed how I think and who I am, my character. And it is not just the videos and the quizzes, which are great. And I have learned a lot from them. Absolutely. I have also just loved diving deep into all of the classics and how every book I read now I can find a principle in it and I can find a way to

Amy Updike: bring it into my heart and recognize truths or untruths.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Principles are so fun once you start to recognize them because you see them in movies and it starts to spoil movies for you and you see them in, sorry, the sun is coming in.

Amy Updike: Hey baby. Sorry, I am in a recorded interview, so I am going to wait for you to leave the room and then I am going to finish what I am going to say.

Amy Updike: Okay. What was I saying?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: How you can find principles as you read books and you can find them in movies and other things like that.

Amy Updike: So looking for principles in these books and movies is so fun. And I also have found that I can look for principles or broken principles in the ballot when I am voting.

Amy Updike: And that has changed the way I vote. It has changed the way I look at articles or things that are going on in the Supreme Court or things that are going on in current events. I can look back and say, okay, what is the principle? What is this person really arguing? What is this person really thinking?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. Is there something we can agree on?

Amy Updike: And where? It has just created so much peace in my life that I do not fly off on the winds of whatever crazy thing is happening. And things happen all the time in the world and in my home. So it just allows me to have way more peace and confidence and control and love.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: That is beautiful. We have this training coming up, which everyone listening, I would love to invite you to come. I would love to have you there. And we are talking about how to stop feeling powerless and become the expert in your own life. And that means exactly what you are talking about, Amy, that you can go to other experts, you can read, go to the doctor, see a therapist, look up someone who is running for office, a candidate.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And at the end of the day, trust that your discernment, that the principles you have discovered, that your decisions about what all these other people are, all this advice that people are giving you, is that you can trust yourself to make those decisions, that you can trust yourself to be the expert about how you ought to move forward.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: I heard a lot of that when you were talking about losing friendships as you tried to be principled. That just requires so much conviction and confidence and discernment, I think, to be able to say, this is the truth and I am going to stand on the truth. And I am sorry if you do not want to come there with me.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And that is unfortunate and I will miss you. But that is who I am going to be, that is what I am going to do.

Amy Updike: I feel like I want to clarify that experience a bit. It was also really, in the experience of choosing to start a new school and knowing that would hurt some people, the old school that I left, it was really important to me to recognize that they also were operating off of really good, wonderful principles.

Amy Updike: And I understood what those principles were.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And it enabled me to think about how I could do things differently and yet recognize that we both were coming from a really good place and love and support them. And I have done my very best to support that school.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And all of those families.

Amy Updike: And even though it personally pricked when a family would choose them over our school

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Sure.

Amy Updike: and still do. There is still a lot of shuffling going on. Even though that happens, I still never react unkindly about it. I always am supportive because I, at my heart, understand even if someone chooses not to go to school at all and go back to public school, or they want to choose to start our school, I support them because the principle is that we as parents have the right to choose what our children, what education they get and how they are educated. We have that right.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And who am I to criticize or take away that truth from them?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And it is all good. We all should educate our children and each child needs something different and sometimes at different times in their lives.

Amy Updike: So just understanding that principle and understanding that it is the application that differs changed my heart completely about it. And do not get me wrong, it still pricked sometimes.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Sure.

Amy Updike: Just like I am sure it pricked for them when I made choices.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Sure.

Amy Updike: But would it not be great if we all saw things that way and we said, okay, that is a different application.

Amy Updike: I can support you in what you are doing and love you for what you are doing and not have it all be about me because it is not about me.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: It is about all of us trying to live the principles in the best application that works for our family at that time.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. Yeah. That is awesome. I agree one hundred percent.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: So is there anything else that you would like to say to anyone listening? What would your advice be to moms that are out there thinking about joining the program or just wanting to navigate their lives better?

Amy Updike: I will shut this curtain. It is starting to glare in my eyes.

Amy Updike: I think I would say that there is nothing more important than what we are doing in our own homes and in our own hearts, and we need to make an investment into ourselves and into our families. And sometimes it takes a really big sacrifice, and it might feel like a big sacrifice, to commit to a program like this or do anything that you are doing to better yourself.

Amy Updike: But there is nothing more important than what we do, than finding a way to improve our relationships, than finding peace in our hearts, than understanding how to navigate this terrifying world. And right now we need it more than ever. I am so grateful that I was exposed to this so long ago so that I had the skills to prepare me for when I really needed it the most.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: The last few years have brought some rough challenges. The passing of my mom and the way it happened was very difficult, to say the least. And having a child that is choosing something different than you ever dreamed for them is hard, and trying to love and understand them. And then I look around and I see so many people just ripped apart in their social groups, even in church, in their families, by the schism that is happening politically and all of the really difficult things that are happening and probably will keep happening.

Amy Updike: And to be able to be secure in what you believe, to be able to be secure in how you act, and you have consciously chosen what that should be and you have practiced it and you are working on it and you are training yourself to respond in a respectful, loving way, who does that anymore? That can change everything.

Amy Updike: It can change everything in your life. And it has, for me. It has made some of these experiences that could have been almost irreparable not just bearable, but some of my relationships are even stronger after.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow.

Amy Updike: Because of knowing who I am, knowing what God’s will is, and knowing what the principles are in any of these situations, or that I know how to find a principle. It is a skill that gives me so much peace and confidence.

Amy Updike: And I just would hope that women would recognize their power, that we have influence over so many people. And because of this I am now at a stage that not only am I secure in myself, and my family is operating well enough, I am working on that. But not only that, but I have been able to turn my focus outward to the community without sacrificing what is going on in my home.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: So many times, as we learn about in the Mission Driven Mom, people turn outward first before they have their hearts and their lives in order. And it has been really beautiful being able to affect so many families in our community.

Amy Updike: And I humbly, when families will come to me and say, I cannot believe how you do this. How do you do so much? How do you run this school? How did you start the school?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And first of all, I did not do it alone at all. It was a team. But it was because I was able to start with principles. I was able to start with a vision of what I wanted. And I was able to use those principles to gather people around me who wanted the same thing. And we have been able to make a really big impact in our little corner of the world. And that is all that matters.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. I,

Amy Updike: I never will be known in the world and I do not care. As long as my friends and family and those people that I am in contact with are bettered because of my influence and that my life is better because of the principles I am choosing, what more matters?

Amy Updike: I just love the opportunity to be able to have an impact on others.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And to be able to create a community that heals families and gives support and is a place that is safe for faith and a place that people learn and love. And it has been life changing to be able to see these kids.

Amy Updike: We have incorporated the five questions into some of our classes, and they are getting there faster than I was. It has been beautiful to watch them go through the Academy and the changes that happen in their families because they are having an impact on their parents.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow.

Amy Updike: I just wish that parents and families would recognize the power of doing both, of having the Mission Driven Mom in their home, but also having the Mission Driven Teen in their home because that has changed my kids quite a bit.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: Especially this one child I talked about that has made different choices. Even still, I can see him using those skills that we talked about years ago. I can see him stopping and trying to rephrase it and trying to see my point of view.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow.

Amy Updike: It has been really powerful. So even though he has made different choices, these skills still have bettered our relationship and bettered our home life.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow.

Amy Updike: So that has been really beautiful too. So I would encourage families to find it in their hearts to do both, to allow the kids this opportunity to change, but also how much more quickly can the culture of the family change? How much faster can we all practice the skills and get better if we are all learning it together?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: So that has been really fun to see families grow in character and grow in their relationships.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And in their confidence and peace.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. Wow. Wow.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: I want to ask you one last question just because on the back of the book, The Mission Driven Life, one of the things that I say, one of the things that is on there, is it talks about how I was searching out these great men and women that really I admired and I wanted to be like them.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And I was trying to crack the code of how they became those kinds of people. And these seven laws of life mission were the pathway for ordinary people to do extraordinary things. And I know that when women listen to someone like you and you are so polished and beautiful and professional and you are doing big things, that maybe they just cannot imagine ever getting to the point where you are.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: I am just wondering, was there a time in your past when the person that you are now and the things that you do now and the influence that you make in your community would have felt impossible for you, that you would have never imagined that you could do the things that you do now?

Amy Updike: Absolutely. In fact I have a dear friend who, I think it was the very first year I started homeschooling, she looked at me and said, you are going to have your own school one day.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Wow.

Amy Updike: And I went, what are you talking about? I am just trying to get the kids out the door and teach my one class. What are you talking about?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And she has a gift for seeing the

Audrey Rindlisbacher: the

Amy Updike: potential in other people. But at that moment I was just thinking I can barely keep my dishes done. I am just trying not to scream at my kids in the morning and not use expletives trying to get them in the car.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Oh, we can laugh now, but it was not funny then.

Amy Updike: And I would cry the whole way there because I am like, I cannot believe what I just said.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Oh.

Amy Updike: But yeah, it is a growing process and so many people will say, I do not know how you homeschool. Like how do you do that?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: I could never do that.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: We can do way more than we think we can.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yes.

Amy Updike: And it is one baby step at a time. I just remember going to Walmart with four little kids and somebody looking at me going, how do you do that? I can barely handle the one. And I said, they do not come all at once.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: You grow with it.

Amy Updike: Grow

Audrey Rindlisbacher: into it. Yep. You grow,

Amy Updike: your capacity grows.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yes.

Amy Updike: And you learn so much through every experience. Every hard experience has taught me so much.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah.

Amy Updike: And so every little baby step, and as long as we are practicing principles and as long as we are just striving, being self aware and just striving to be a little bit better, it does not even have to be every day. We take steps back, but just over time.

Amy Updike: Yeah. As long as the trajectory is that we are able to do a little bit more each time, it is pretty incredible. And I bet you think that too. I look at you and I am just like, oh, how do you do what you do so much and raise your family?

Audrey Rindlisbacher: Yeah. I just want women that are listening to know that if you are in that place where you are like, I never could, just do not sell yourself short. It is not true. You just do not know what you can do with the right tools, the right guidance, the right mentors, the right women around you,

Amy Updike: Yeah.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: and the right support systems and all of that kind of thing. Amy, you are amazing. I really am honored that you would come on today and share your story with us and be so honest and vulnerable and I really think you are just such an amazing woman.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: So grateful for you and for all that you do and the influence that you have and everything that you have shared today. And so for those listening, if you want to understand better the kinds of things that Amy has been talking about and understand how you could become more of an expert in your own life and what this thing called principles is and how they work and why they matter and how they could change your life, then I would invite you to click on the link in the description and register for this training that I am going to do.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And we are going to spend just an hour and a half together and I am going to walk you through some things that will get you jump started on this path and you will be able to start doing some of the things that Amy is talking about and have a window into how you really can become so much more than you think you can.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: How you can solve your problems with truth, how the truth really will make you free. And more than that, you can learn who you really are and walk with confidence. Look at the kind of example that Amy is to her family and the confidence and conviction that she shows them. We are the heartbeat of the home and we represent motherhood and womanhood and adulthood.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And our example is everything. It is everything. And there is just no reason to wait one more day to learn how to overcome whatever is in your way and move forward. Be more of that example that you would want to be. So I would invite you to join us for that training that is coming up soon. I would love to see you there.

Audrey Rindlisbacher: And Amy, thank you again for being here with us. You are incredible and I wish you and your school and your community and your family all the best and hope you continue to grow and have more success in the future.

Amy Updike: Thank you so much. You are too kind. I do not feel like I am that great, but I really appreciate it.

In this episode, Audrey talks with MDM Academy graduate Cadie Hatch about homeschooling, higher education, classical learning, motherhood, and the journey that led her to help launch a classical charter school in her community.

Cadie shares how her experience in the Academy showed her what principles are and how to use them, the confidence, and clarity she needed to lead, serve, and persevere through a difficult but deeply meaningful project.

This conversation is a beautiful reminder that moms matter, education matters, and ordinary women can do extraordinary good in the world.

RESOURCES

Audrey:

Welcome back to the podcast. I am Audrey Rindlisbacher. I’m excited to be with you today. If you are new to the podcast, make sure and go back to the beginning. Listen to some of those early podcasts so you can learn about the seven laws of life, mission, and mission-driven stories, and all of those things, so you can have an understanding of what we do here at the Mission-Driven Mom and on this podcast.

I’m joined today by Cadie Hatch. She is a dear friend and an MDM Academy graduate, and we get to dig into her experiences and learn a lot from her today. I’m really grateful to her for joining us and for being willing to share herself, her time, and her experiences.

Cadie, welcome. Thank you for being here.

Cadie:

Thank you, Audrey. It has been a dream of mine to be on the podcast one day, so I’m excited.

Audrey:

There you go. Here we are, fulfilling dreams all the time.

Cadie:

Yeah.

Audrey:

Yeah. So tell us, just introduce yourself briefly. I’ll ask you more questions, we’ll dig into your story more. Tell us just a little bit about yourself.

Cadie:

Sure. So I was born and raised in New Mexico, and I have to say that because I feel like there’s not very many New Mexicans that you hear about.

Audrey:

So yes, that’s, you are very kind for sure.

Cadie:

So I am a New Mexican. I grew up in a home where I was the youngest of five children. My father was self-employed. He and his first cousin were business partners for their entire career. My dad was a logger, and he logged on the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation near where we lived. And so with that we got a lot of really unique experiences as kids, the things that we got to do. We spent a lot of time out in the woods, and he was an avid hunter, sportsman, and he loved being out in the woods. And it was just great. He gave us an amazing childhood, which I’m very grateful for.

My mother, she homeschooled us.

Audrey:

Wow.

Cadie:

My oldest brother, when he was going into eighth grade, my mom decided to pull everybody out and homeschool. That was the year that I would have gone into kindergarten. So I was homeschooled my entire K through 12 education.

Audrey:

What made her decide to do that? Do you know?

Cadie:

I think she was just, I want to do something different. I think I remember her saying a couple girls called my brother, and she was like, oh no, we’re not doing that. It’s way too early for that.

Audrey:

Oh, that’s funny.

Cadie:

So anyway, because of my dad’s work, we just had some really unique opportunities where the boys could go and they could work with him.

Audrey:

Oh.

Cadie:

And they were able to be out in the woods working with him and all of our extended family, and it was a really amazing opportunity for them.

Audrey:

Wow. To just gain some life skills in that way. And so I think if there was a theme for my life, like three things, it would probably really be faith, family, and education.

Cadie:

Because I think growing up as somebody who had been homeschooled and was used to doing things differently in terms of education, I have not been too put off by going my own route in education throughout my life. And I think that kind of really set me up for some of the things that I ended up doing as I became an adult and as I continued in my education.

Cadie:

When I was younger, I got my GED when I was 16.

Audrey:

Oh wow.

Cadie:

And I ended up moving out a few months before I turned 18. I moved to Arizona and I went to a little community college in Arizona, and that’s where I ended up meeting my husband. I got my associate’s degree in business administration, and we met there and I just fell in love with him, almost like on first sight, which is so silly, but it’s true.

One of the things that attracted me so much to him was his, I almost hesitate to use the word ambition because I feel like sometimes that can have this negative connotation of it’s all about me. But he was just a doer. I could see that in him when we would be walking across campus, and I would just watch the way that he walked. He was going somewhere. He had a plan. He always had a planner. He’s always been an avid goal setter. And so he sets these goals and he reaches these goals.

And so I knew from pretty early on, when I first met him, that he was going to be doing things in his life. Life wouldn’t happen to him. He would be doing things.

Audrey:

Oh, that’s awesome.

Cadie:

And I really wanted to go with him and be part of that with him.

And we met there at college. We were married, and it’s been an adventure ever since. We thought we would stay in Arizona, but we got a job opportunity that brought us up to northeastern Nevada. And we’ve been up here for about 12 years, almost 13 years.

We thought that we would just be here for a little while and go back down to Arizona. But we’ve loved it so much. I just don’t know that we’ll ever leave. I love it up here. It’s been great.

Audrey:

And you are on some land.

Cadie:

We have a little, a small town. So we live, Elko is the main city. I mean, it’s not huge, but Elko is the bigger town, and we live about 20 miles outside of Elko. And so we’ve got about 10 acres. We moved to that property in 2020, and I was just thinking about this morning, when we moved, we thought, we’ve always just bought all of our furniture from yard sales. Let’s get, like, new furniture.

Audrey:

There you go.

Cadie:

That would be so exciting. We’re getting this new house, we’ll get new furniture. So we sold all of our furniture. We moved to our house in March of 2020, and the next week everything shut down and there was no furniture to be had.

Audrey:

I did not know that. That’s hilarious.

Cadie:

All we had was this giant overstuffed beanbag, and that was the one piece of furniture that we had in our living room that we would all just sit on.

Audrey:

Did you at least have beds?

Cadie:

We did have our beds. We did save our beds. So we had that. But we didn’t have a kitchen table, so we ended up yard saleing again and buying more yard sale furniture because you couldn’t get it from the furniture store, which was fine.

Audrey:

Wow. That’s hilarious.

Cadie:

But the thing also about moving to that property in 2020, and again, I think this kind of highlights Tim, my husband, as a doer, is that when we moved there, I knew he wanted to plant a garden, but I thought, oh, eventually, in a couple years we’ll plant a garden.

Audrey:

Yeah.

Cadie:

But we moved there in March and by June we had cleared off the property and we had put in an acre garden.

Audrey:

Wow.

Cadie:

And we planted, almost all of it was pumpkins. We had a few potatoes, but I think it was all pumpkins that first year, and he was so driven to get that done. And I couldn’t understand, like, why are you needing to plant this garden so much?

Audrey:

Yeah.

Cadie:

And he just kept saying to me, I just have a feeling that this garden, this will make people happy. That if they come out here, it will help people. They’ll just be happy when they come get pumpkins.

Audrey:

Wow.

Cadie:

And again, that was COVID. That was March 2020. Everything shut down. By the time we got to October, we hadn’t really met many people because our churches were closed at the time. Our communities, different things that we would normally do to get together with people, just weren’t happening. We didn’t really meet our neighbors.

And so by October everybody was ready to get out of the house. And because it was outside, we could say, come over, and we just put a sign out on the field and said, come in, get a pumpkin, we’ll come and meet you. And that’s how we met most of our neighbors.

Audrey:

Wow.

Cadie:

And it was a really great experience, and it’s always been something that we’ve done as a thank you to the people who my husband works with in his business, his career. We’ve planted those pumpkins for the last four, we’ve done four out of the five years.

Audrey:

Wow. And that’s coming up. That’s this week, right? Didn’t you say that?

Cadie:

That’s this week. We are having our pumpkin patch. It’s early October.

Audrey:

So great.

Audrey:

All right, so let’s talk about your MDM journey. How you learned about what we do and what that looked like for you. So go back. Here you are, you’re a mom, you have a few children, and you were a full time mom, right, a stay at home mom?

Cadie:

Yes.

Audrey:

And starting to homeschool. Did you always know, was that always the plan? I’m going to get married, I’m going to have kids, and homeschool them?

Cadie:

Yeah, that was always my plan. I did tell Tim that when we get married, because he was in school, we were both in school, and I said, my goal, I want to be a stay at home mom. I really believe in the importance of moms at home with their kids. So I want to have kids, I want to stay home with my kids, and I want to homeschool because I was homeschooled. I loved it. I want to do that.

And bless him, he went along with me.

And how I ended up actually finding MDM is interesting. At the time my sister and I would talk a lot about books that we enjoyed, and I remember her saying, oh, you’ve got to read, you’ve got to go online to this website, Books You Love, or I don’t remember if it was a website. You were doing something called Books You Love.

Audrey:

Mm hmm.

Cadie:

And you were doing these book reviews. I think you did them with your kids, right?

Audrey:

Mm hmm.

Cadie:

Yeah. And I just remember, I was like, oh, all these cute little kids, these book reviews, like my dream, right? Like how cool.

And so we would get on there, and what I appreciated about you at that point, I only had my associate’s degree, and again, that was in business administration. I had taken like one literature class during my associate’s degree time. And so I had read enough literature through that degree program to be like, every time they read a book, it’s just all about some kind of sexual revolution, right? Like, how are women being oppressed and that they needed to be liberated through their sexuality.

Every story that we read, and I would read some of these, I’m like, I really don’t think that’s what this story is about. And they were like, no, no, it is. This is what it’s about.

And so I was like, okay.

So when I read the books that you were suggesting in Books You Love, you had a way of reading the books that was so much more authentic to what I felt the author’s actual intent was.

And when I would leave there, I felt, I would read something and I would come away feeling noble, like I was a better person for having read that.

Audrey:

Wow.

Cadie:

Even if it was something that I didn’t agree with, like the author may have said some things I didn’t agree on, I still felt like I came away a better person because I had learned something from you and how you had read that book.

Audrey:

Oh, that’s great.

Cadie:

At that point, I think I had three kids when I would read Books You Love. And we got busy and life just got away from us, and so I got away from what you were doing. But every once in a while I think I would check back in because I just had this thought, one day she’s going to have a school or something, and I just want to go to her school. That would be so great.

So in the meantime, I have to admit here, when my husband was getting his bachelor’s degree, I was not a very supportive wife.

Audrey:

Wow.

Cadie:

This goes back to this idea of me being, my dad was an entrepreneur, I was a homeschooled kid. If you wanted to go the college route, that’s fine, but if you don’t want to go the college route, you can start a business, that’s fine too.

And so when my husband was getting his bachelor’s degree, there were just times when it was really hard, and when it would get really hard, he’d be like, I don’t want to do this right now. And I’d say, you don’t have to. We’ll just go start a business. It’s fine.

Audrey:

Yeah.

Cadie:

And so he was like, that is not helping me in this moment. And I’m like, but really, we could, you don’t have to do this. We could do something else.

And so I regret that. I do regret that I was not more supportive of him in getting his bachelor’s degree.

So what ended up happening was years later he wanted to go back for his master’s. And he had always known he wanted a master’s degree. And so he told me, I feel like now is a good time for me to go back for my master’s degree, and I feel like if you were getting your bachelor’s degree, it might go better than last time. Maybe you’d be more supportive.

Audrey:

Oh, funny.

Cadie:

So I was like, fine, sure. I’ll go get my bachelor’s degree.

So at that point, my husband is getting his master’s, I’m getting my bachelor’s, I think I had a second grader, a kindergartner, and two toddlers.

Audrey:

Wow.

Cadie:

And we went back to school, and he got his master’s degree and I got my bachelor’s degree.

Audrey:

How did you do it? What did you do with kids and how did you afford it?

Cadie:

Yeah. We are very blessed that he has a really great job that has been a blessing to our family. And so we were able to afford it. We were able to just manage it with his income.

And then with the kids, it was one of those things I was like, I haven’t been sleeping for years anyway, so now that the baby is sleeping, why sleep now?

Audrey:

Yeah.

Cadie:

The baby is sleeping through the night, so I can get a solid six hours, and then if I get up at five, I can study for an hour or two before the kids wake up. And then we can just go with the rest of the day.

And that’s how it went for a while. A lot of early mornings and late nights probably got us through that.

And it was a really good experience. I’m really glad that I went back and got my bachelor’s degree. I got my degree in English language and literature.

So now this time everything that I was doing was reading. And I had such high hopes. Oh, we’re going to read some Shakespeare. I’m going to read some of the greats. This is going to be amazing. I’m so excited. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to read some really good classics and have great conversations.

Audrey:

Yeah.

Cadie:

And that is not what happened at all.

So I was highly disappointed in the education that I got for my actual degree. One of the things that was really, preached maybe is not the best word, but it seems like the most fitting word to use, one of the ideas that was most heavily preached to us as students was postmodernism.

Everything was falling apart. Humanity was awful. There was nothing that was going to get any better. So it was just, do whatever you have to do to survive and get yourself on top. That’s the goal.

Audrey:

And there’s nothing that’s objectively true.

Cadie:

No. And you could argue, just do whatever works.

And so when we would read books together, we were told never to go back and look at the author, never to research the author, or to consider the time in which that person lived, but just to take the book, open it up, and just start shredding it.

Deconstruction was the thing. Just deconstruct, deconstruct. And so any bit of beauty that was ever in this book or intended to be in the book was gone.

Audrey:

Yeah. Wow.

Cadie:

And it was soul searing. It was a horrible way to go through reading books. I felt awful about myself. I felt awful about the world. I would look at things that my fellow students would say in these forums, these conversations that we would have, and it was just heartbreaking to see that any argument always came down to men are evil, white people are awful, and every system is designed to make you fail.

And I just didn’t believe that.

But you surround yourself with that for two years and it just starts to eat into your psyche. It’s very degrading.

Cadie:

And so I remember at one point I had completely forgotten about you, Audrey. I’m sorry, but I totally forgot about you during this time.

Audrey:

That’s perfectly fine. That’s funny.

Cadie:

But I had forgotten I had read with you until we read a play, A Doll’s House.

Audrey:

A Doll’s House. Yeah. I can’t remember the author. Do you remember the author?

Cadie:

I had it written down.

Audrey:

Oh, Henrik Ibsen.

Cadie:

Ibsen. That’s right.

So we read the play A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, and I remembered, oh my gosh, I remember this play because I read it with that lady Audrey in Books You’ll Love.

And so at that point I was maybe six months away from finishing my degree, and it’s like, I’ve got to go see what that lady said about Ibsen and A Doll’s House. Surely it got better than this sludge that I’m working through with this college class. This is just terrible.

So I went back and I found Books You’ll Love, and by that point you had started The Mission Driven Mom and it was just getting going. So I found some of the information I was looking for about Ibsen, and then I told my husband, when I finish this degree, I really want to go and study with Audrey. I want to go to her online academy.

And he was much more supportive of me and was like, if that’s what you want to do, we can make that happen.

And I graduated in April of 2020 and I think I started with you in May of 2020 at the Mission Driven Mom. And that was a very eye opening experience because it was all those things I thought that I was going to get in my degree program, but it was not at the college, it was at your academy.

I was like, we’re reading great books, I feel really good about what I’m reading, I come away ennobled, these authors are being honored for the good work that they have done, or we are looking at the things that they have written that are not correct and we’re able to objectively see why they are wrong. But I am coming away a better person after having experienced these books.

And so that was, it’s a long story, but it took several years, and eventually I made my way back to MDM.

Audrey:

Yeah. So you were in it for the more intellectual piece, the academic, the reading. So with that expectation, did you feel disappointed that there were some children’s novels or that we vet the content so much and it’s just selections from different books? Or how did you feel about that?

Cadie:

No, actually in a lot of ways I appreciated it because I could see that you were trying to hone a skill. Like you were trying to give me a specific skill.

And when I went through level one, I’m not sure how things are now, but when I went through level one, things were much more self paced. And I had an accountability partner, the most amazing lady. I loved my accountability partner going through level one. She did me so many great services.

We would reach out to each other about once a month or once every two weeks and say, here’s our goal. We want to get through this much of the workbook. At the time there was a workbook that we had. So we want to get through this much of the workbook and the readings, and then we’re going to call each other and see how it went.

And the two of us together, you had a celebration coming up that fall, and we wanted to finish before the celebration so that we could come.

Audrey:

That is pretty fast.

Cadie:

We went through it pretty fast. I want to say it was six months, somewhere in there. But I was so glad that we did because I felt like we were laser focused on, this is the skill that we’re trying to learn. These are the principles that we’re learning. This is how we’re implementing them.

And it was a great blessing. And I think part of that came because I had just come out of my degree where I was used to having some deadlines, and I had already worked my schedule out with my family. That helped me be able to accomplish that goal so quickly.

Audrey:

Yeah. So what are a couple of your takeaways from level one?

Cadie:

You had created a card, there was a card that you had given out at one of the celebrations, but you had also created the 12 characteristics of a true principle. And that has stuck with me. I used that often. I used it very regularly, especially at that time. I still pull it out and use it and look at it to try to figure out, is this thing that I’m studying right now, is this a true principle?

The main characteristic that has stuck with me is the win win. Is the thing that I’m doing right now creating a win win situation for everyone? If it’s not a win for everybody, then it’s not done yet. I have to keep working until everybody has won and feels good about it.

And the other thing that was a huge takeaway from level one was your willing versus willful lesson. You compared C S Lewis to Nietzsche, and I have listened to that one probably a couple times a year because it made such an impact on me.

This idea of, are you willing to let go of the things that you want, let go of the way that you think things need to be, to let God take over and move you where you need to be? Are you willing or are you willful?

I had never considered my attitude in that way. Is this a willing attitude that I have right now, or is this a willful attitude? That made a huge impact on me, and it is something that I still think about regularly when I feel like I have a decision to make and I do not necessarily know which way to go.

I think often about, am I being willing or willful right now?

Audrey:

So what do you think about the whole emphasis on principles? Why do you feel like that matters?

Cadie:

Interestingly, I remember for years something had been niggling at me in the corner of my mind, and it was like, I do not understand when people say this word principle. I do not understand what they mean.

Sometimes I hear a principle and it is just a one word thing, like forgiveness might be a principle, or service might be a principle. And then other people would say something and it would be this big long phrase and that was a principle, and it was like, I do not understand. Help me understand. What are we talking about?

And when I went back to MDM and I saw that principles was such a heavy emphasis in the academy, I was like, this is the thing that I need because I do not understand what people are talking about when they are talking about principles. I feel like they are important, but I do not know what they are.

And so it helped me so much to come into MDM and start studying, looking for principles in the things that I read. And the principles being, what is a truth that is in this book, whether it is fiction, nonfiction, biography, whatever. What is a truth that I can find here that I can then take into my life and apply to my circumstances that will make my life or my family’s life better?

And the fact that we practiced that across so many genres of literature was really valuable to me.

Cadie:

Fairytales have been something that I have been thinking about recently because I have been listening to someone who is talking about C S Lewis and Tolkien as myth writers. They were great at telling story through myth. How we have this idea that a myth is a lie, but really they would say a myth is a way of telling the truth that is different than any other way of being able to tell the truth.

And so I think about that with fairytales. Fairytales tell a truth that is hard to convey in any other way.

I was thinking about this with The Princess and the Pea. We were just talking about it the other day, me and my husband. I will give you an example maybe of what it was like to read something like that from my degree perspective.

You have this queen. Her son, the prince, is wanting to marry this princess. And so she puts her through this test where she puts the pea underneath all of these mattresses and she wants to know, can this princess feel if there is a pea underneath all of these mattresses.

And the princess wakes up the next morning and she is all black and blue and she says, I have been all beat up. There is something underneath my mattresses. And the queen says, oh, you really are a princess because you could feel that pea underneath all those mattresses.

A lot of people would be like, this is the most ridiculous story. This girl is such a wuss. She is full of drama. She is not someone you would want to have marry your son.

But if you look at it through the lens of myth, and that it is telling the truth, if the princess, her role in a fairytale is to be the virtue, she is the symbol of virtue. She is the symbol of what is good. Her job is to be the compass for everybody else to know what is right and what is wrong.

And this pea that is underneath these mattresses is something that is wrong. It is something that is bad, and she can sense it. Even underneath all those layers of comfort, she can sense that something is wrong.

And so this test that the queen puts her through to see if she is a good match for the prince, the prince’s job is to defend all of that truth. He cannot defend it if he does not have the compass to point him to what is good and what is wrong. There is an equal match between a prince and a princess, and they each have their job.

That is a myth to teach us about the roles of men and women. They each have a really important role, and it is okay that they have a different role.

So the woman’s role, she points to what is virtuous, what is good, and the man’s role is to defend that. And we need each other.

And so that idea of, okay, I just learned a principle from The Princess and the Pea. There is a principle here about, are there gender roles? I think there are. And should we notice them? Should we give them any credence, any credibility? I think we should.

How do I apply this in my life? I know what my role is in my marriage. My job is to seek out virtue and to notice when it is around and to notice when it is not there, and to be this compass for my family. That is my job. And so I have to be careful about the things that I take into my mind. I have to be careful about the things that I think about, that I dwell on, because my role is to help us discern what is good and what is virtuous.

Audrey:

Wow, that is so beautiful.

Audrey:

Tell us a little bit about building a principle centered home and life. What difference has it made for you to have this understanding about principles and this ability to discern them better? How has it changed things for you and your family?

Cadie:

When we were in level two, we read The Ox Bow Incident, and that book had a really great impact on me, partly because of when we were reading it. It is about cattle rustling, and some cows have been stolen and this town has been having problems with rustlers for a while. And so they mount up a posse and they go and they find the guy that rustled these cattle and they administer justice, in their own idea.

And I do not want to spoil the book for people, because it is a fantastic book.

But when I read that book, we were discussing mob mentality. And I think January 6th had just happened like a couple of weeks before. We had just seen a bunch of riots happening all across the country during that summer of COVID and all of those things. We had seen a lot of mob mentality happening in real life.

And so I have my book and I went to the back and I wrote down, I found 11 characteristics of a mob.

And when I saw what the characteristics of a mob were, I started to really check myself when I would start feeling very passionate about something, because mobs are always very passionate.

Passion is not a bad thing, but it is all about how are we directing it, and are we allowing our passion for something to turn off our ability to think and to be objective and to search for truth first.

I think to a degree it comes back to what I was saying about being this compass within your family. I think women are the compass of the family. And so we have to watch where our passions lead us.

Those passions are important. They are valuable. We need them. But we need to make sure that we are directing them in the proper place.

As far as things that we read in level three that really helped me, human action laws. Talking about the human action laws, which basically was just understanding that everybody does what they are doing for a reason. You may not agree with the reason, you may not like the reason, but they are not just out of control acting. People do things on purpose for a reason. They are motivated by something. Every action is motivated by something.

And when I learned about that and the human action laws, it helped me understand that I need to build better bridges with people. That people can have a difference of belief or a difference of opinion than what I have, but there is something driving that and motivating that, and I need to try to understand what that is.

And it helps me have greater compassion for other people and to connect with them more. It helps me to recognize, this is a person who at the very base of themselves is probably acting because they have heard some principle, some truth, that is motivating them to act, but that truth has been twisted in some way.

So how can I get back to understanding that they are motivated by some truth somewhere back in there. Something is motivating them. Where is it that we finally meet? What is the truth that they are acting on, that if it is a truth, then I should be willing to act on as well? How do we get all the way back to that first principle so that then we can build off of the first principle and come to a position that will work for all of us, that will give us that win win situation?

That was pretty huge for me in level three.

Audrey:

Talk to us about what you have done since MDM, this big major project, your C to B that you were involved with. How did you get involved? Why did you get involved? How did the education you had had make a difference? And where is the project now?

Cadie:

It is a pretty incredible story. I feel like a very miraculous story, and my involvement in it at all still feels miraculous, that I was even a part of it.

So the project that I took on, I think it happened because I asked God for it.

We were reading the book Christie. It is about this girl, 19 or 20 years old, and she goes up into the Appalachian Mountains and she teaches school to some people up there, and it is an incredible story. In some ways it reminded me somewhat of this area that I live in.

Because where I live, we are pretty rural. We have a lot of ranching families, and for many of those families, for their kids to be able to go to high school, it can often mean that they have to move away and live in town for those four years of high school.

And I had just talked to somebody who was saying, our oldest is getting to the point where we are needing to decide, are we going to keep her out here with us on the ranch and kind of homeschool through that experience, or are we going to send her to live with some friends in town? That happens pretty regularly for these families.

And it just reminded me a little bit of the people in the book Christie. And I just fell in love with this idea of having a school, and I really wanted to have a school that promoted virtue and goodness in the students.

And so I had just been thinking about Christie for a long time. And a lot of things happened in 2020. It was the Christmas of 2020. I stumbled upon Hillsdale College K through 12 schools. I just came across it on my phone, and I saw that and I was like, that would be cool if we could start a little charter school.

And so I emailed them and I said, can you tell me what it would look like? What do I need to do to start one of these schools? And the list they sent back was gargantuan, and I was like, that is not going to happen.

I knew one person in my community who had started a charter school, and I sent her that list as a gag. If you ever wanted to start another charter school, here is one we could do.

And she was like, yeah, that is funny.

And time passed, things moved on, and two years later she reached out to me and said, hey, did you know that there was a group of people from Elko that went and toured a Hillsdale school in Idaho? Were you part of that group?

And I said, no, I had no idea that anyone was going to tour a Hillsdale school in Idaho. I totally would have gone.

And she said, here is a contact for this group. Maybe you could reach out and just see what they have to say.

So I called the number she gave me. I got an answering machine and I left a message. And while I was waiting to get a call back from this person, I learned a little bit more about who he was and his political career in Nevada and that he had run against Harry Reid.

And I was like, this guy will never call me back. He is an important person. What was I thinking?

And probably about a week after that, I was sitting in my living room doing morning time with my kids. We were reading a story, and I get a call back from this man. And I ran into my bathroom because that was the only quiet place I could find. And I answered the phone and he said, I am so glad you called. We would love to have your help. Go to this place at this time, get the information for our next meeting, and we will meet you there.

And I said, okay.

And so when I went into that first board meeting, I only knew one other person in the room and there were probably about 12 people. These were all various people from our community who had done incredible things. We had county commissioners, people who owned businesses, people who had made a career in education. These were people who had a lot of influence and a lot of background in what we were doing.

And every meeting for the first six months, I walked in just scared to death because I was like, I have no idea what we are even doing really, or talking about, but I am just going to keep showing up.

And I learned so much about the process of what it would be to start a charter school.

I was very ignorant. When we first started, I was like, six months, we will get this thing open in six months. It will be great. And again, I learned quite a bit. It took us two and a half years to finally get the charter school open, and it just opened a couple months ago, August of 2025.

That is why I say to me, it is very miraculous that I even was involved in this group and was in the room at all. But I truly think it happened because I asked God, I want a school. I really want a school that teaches kids about virtue. I have seen what postmodernism does in education. This is a horrible thing. I do not want children growing up with this. Can we get a school that teaches virtue?

And my role on the school board for the charter school was, I had the most experience at the time with classical education and children because I had classically educated my children their entire education. And so I could speak to the more classical elements of what a Hillsdale K through 12 charter school was intended to be.

And so I could help inform on that level what was going on.

It became my role over time, and everybody on the board did everything, everybody was pitching in wherever they could, but generally my role was to do some of the community relations, public relations. I did several interviews on the radio here locally with another one of our board members. We did community events where we would try to educate the community on what a classical charter school was and what that meant. And I was also the liaison between our charter school board and our public school district board.

And it was an incredible experience.

Cadie:

One of the things that I know we talk about a lot at the academy is when you have something that you are wanting to do, take your family with you. Have your family be involved in the mission work that you are doing.

And I have to tell you this story because it is an important story.

I struggled a lot with not feeling very qualified to be part of this board. And I remember we were turning in an application and we needed to have everybody’s resume on the board, and I was like, I do not have a resume. I have little kids. I am a stay at home mom. I do not have a resume.

And I was really having a freak out moment over this stupid resume. It feels dumb now when I look back at it, but at the time it was a big deal to me. And I remember saying to myself over and over again, you are not a professional. I am not a professional. I do not have anything to put on here to convince anyone why I should be on this board. I have no experience that is meaningful to anybody.

And I remember praying about it that night and asking God, what am I supposed to do? I am freaking out here about this stupid application.

And I remember the answer that I got was, I did not make you to be a professional.

And I was surprised. That took me back, and I was like, I feel like I need that right now though.

And so in the months that came, we held a community event where we had basically a big information meeting for anybody in the community who would want to come and learn about this school.

We had a gentleman who was very gracious, who was running a Hillsdale school. He was the principal of a Hillsdale school. He was willing to come and speak to our community and tell them about, this is the school that we have in Idaho, this is how it is going, you could have the same thing in Elko.

And as we were putting together the program, the board asked if there was a student who would be willing to recite a poem at this meeting. And I was like, that is me. I am the one with the students.

So I went home and I asked my son, he was 12 at the time, would you be willing to memorize a poem to recite at this meeting?

And he was like, I guess. He does not like memorizing things, but I was like, could you just, it would be great.

And so he memorized the poem If by Rudyard Kipling.

Audrey:

So good.

Cadie:

It is such a great poem. And he had been working on it and he just could not say it correctly when we practiced. He could not get through it without messing up a little bit. And so he was nervous when it came time for him to get up and give that poem.

And I told him, you are going to be great. It is going to be fine. You have got this.

And he went up there and he had never said that poem so well. He did not make a single mistake. There were like 80 people in there watching him, and he got up and said that poem and it was excellent. He did so well. I was so proud of him.

And when our speaker got up to talk about the schools, he stopped and he said, but wait, I want to tell that boy what a good job he did on that poem. He said, we have kids memorize that poem in our school, and it is a requirement that they pass off that poem.

And he said, that was one of the best recitations I have heard of that poem. You did such a great job.

And so at the end I went up to meet him, and I had my little lanyard on with my little name tag that said board member. And I walked up to him and I was there with my son, and he complimented my son again, and then he looked at me and he said, you are the mom, aren’t you?

And I said, yes, I am the mom.

I am not the professional. I am not the board member. I am the mom. This is my job.

And it was such an incredible experience to me of the value of being a mother. This project, this school, was valuable and important to me, but that was not my job. I was not made to be a professional. I was made to be the mom.

And moms have such a power for good in this world.

And I loved that when I came to MDM, MDM celebrated moms. It gave me an opportunity to do this big project that was something I never would have done without MDM. But first it helped me understand, you have an important role to play as a mom. That it should not be undervalued, and you should not undercut yourself because you are just the mom.

Like moms are really important, and they are the ones that get a lot of the great things done. They are the compass for the home.

And nowhere else was I hearing this. My degree was not going to tell me that I was valuable to the community, to society as a whole, because I was a mother. No one else was saying that.

And so to come to a place where I could study and feel so much value in what I wanted, my dream was to be a stay at home homeschool mom, and it helped me be better at that.

And then to go on and do some other things, which I am very proud of my school, I love it. I love being there. My kids and I go now, we volunteer, we go in on Tuesdays and we spend a couple hours every Tuesday at the school helping the little kids. And I love it. It is great.

But my kids are with me when I do it. And they are my focus at this time in my life. And I am really grateful for that because there are times and seasons, it is not always going to be this way. But I did not leave them behind to fulfill some big project that I wanted to do. They came with me and they were a part of it with me the whole time. And so has my husband. It has been a family affair, and it has been great.

Audrey:

How do you feel that committing to that project and seeing it through, what did it do for you personally?

Cadie:

I think one of the things that I learned about myself through that project was that if the Lord asked me to do something, I would say yes.

Even if it was hard. That school was extremely difficult. There were moments that were very exhausting and hard, and it was just perseverance over and over again. We would try, we would try, we would try. We met with a lot of rejection, especially at the beginning. We met with plenty of pushback. Some people were very concerned about what a classical school would mean and what it would look like.

And so it had to be learning how to communicate with people that you did not agree with. And I am still not great at it. I wish I were better, but it gave me a lot of opportunity to practice.

But ultimately what I learned about myself is, if the Lord asks me to do something, I will do it. And I know I said that I asked for that school, but I asked at the beginning. By the end, he was asking me to finish, because I did not want to finish. It was hard.

But with him, I was able to stick it through and we were able to finish and we were able to get the school to opening.

We are still early on and we are still a growing organization. We still have a lot to learn, but I am so grateful that when the kids come in, they have a place to come where they are being taught to be honest, to persevere, to serve each other, to finish their work. They can do this. They can do hard things. And they are told that all the time when they come in. You can do hard things. We believe in you. We encourage you. Be courteous. Be kind to the people around you. It feels good to be in a space like that.

But ultimately, how did that school change me? It was to know that I really can do all things through Christ.

Audrey:

That is beautiful. I think it is so ironic too, that it is such an open handed gift of servant leadership because your children will not even ever attend it.

Cadie:

Yeah, that is true. At the beginning I thought that they would be able to attend, but over time we realized that in order to open and to be financially solvent through these beginning years, the school would have to open as a kindergarten through third grade only and add one grade level every year. And all of my kids were past third grade.

So we are continuing to homeschool, but I love having them come with me when we go volunteer in the school. It is a great opportunity.

Audrey:

What would you want to say to moms out there who might be listening?

Cadie:

For anyone who is listening, I would say, as women we have an incredible influence on the lives around us, and I do not think we realize how big that influence is. I still do not really realize how big my influence is and often struggle with really considering that I have much of an influence. But I know that it is there.

It is not unlike the story that I told you about The Princess and the Pea. As the women, our role is to find goodness and virtue and to point it out.

If I could give any encouragement to women in general, it would be guard your marriages. Keep that relationship sacred. Respect it. Show respect to your husband, and be grateful for the support that he lends to you, and lend him support. Because marriages that fail really impact your children so much.

So if you want to have a really positive impact for your children, guard your marriage. Show your kids what a healthy and happy marriage looks like, and give them that gift.

Audrey:

What is the last thing you would say to anyone who is considering the academy or coming to the event, getting involved in some way with the programs at the Mission Driven Mom?

Cadie:

I would have to say, again, I have had a lot of different educational experiences. I was the homeschooled kid. I was someone who has gone to college. I have helped with a charter school. I am all about education, wherever you can get education.

What I would say about MDM is, I never got a better education anywhere than in the time that I spent studying at MDM. That was the most foundational in helping me realize the good that I could do in the world.

And when I graduated from college, I had this belief that when I graduated I would feel competent, like I could go out and do something in my community. And that did not happen. If anything, it was the exact opposite of that. I felt like I did not have any tools to be able to serve people. Even if I were to get a job teaching in the literature department, I did not feel like I had the tools to do that.

MDM is an online academy. You are not going to get an accredited degree from there. But if you want an actual, true, solid education, go to MDM, because you will finish and you will feel that you can go out and do some good in the world.

And I would never have taken on the charter school if I had not done MDM first. I would never have done it. Because I had some of that background that helped guide me in knowing where I could find true principles. I knew that I could find principles of education that would help guide what the school would be. I knew I could find principles of relationships that would help guide my marriage to be the best that it could be. I got actionable tools that helped me to live a great life.

And so if you are wanting a good education, it is not always about the career at the end. Sometimes it is just being educated in how to live well.

And I think MDM does that so well for moms. And I just love and appreciate you, Audrey, for what you gave me because that was what the academy did for me. And I am so grateful because I know it has not been an easy road for you either to keep this up and going. And it is a huge gift and a huge blessing to have been a part of it. And I just want to thank you for that.

Audrey:

Oh, thank you. Yes, you are right, it has not all been easy, but such a joy. I have met some of the most incredible people in my life, you included. And it is a joy and a privilege. It is just like your experience with the charter school, there are highs and lows, but looking back, boy, so glad you did it.

Cadie:

Yeah.

Audrey:

So glad you did it. Absolutely. And you come out of it such a different person.

So thank you, Cadie, so much for everything that you have shared. You are such an inspiration. I hope that moms will take to heart what you have said and really understand their incredible worth and the need that the world has for them to rise to the occasion in their motherhood and be the best mothers and wives they can be. It is so critical for all of us.

So anyway, such a joy to talk to you. Thank you so much for being with us.

Cadie:

Thank you, Audrey. It was great. I appreciate it. Love you, friend.

Audrey:

You too.

If you want, I can turn this into a polished downloadable document next.

We are living in a confusing culture. 

As mothers, we feel the weight of it in a unique way because we are not just navigating it for ourselves. We are leading children who will inherit whatever kind of world we help build.

If you have ever wondered how to lead your family with confidence when everything feels unstable, this episode is for you. 

In this conversation, we unpack:

Listen to episode 143 of The Mission Driven Mom Podcast, “Leading Your Family with Principles” here or wherever you listen to your podcasts. 

______________________________________________________________

Welcome back to the podcast. I amAudrey Rindlisbacher, author of the Mission Driven Life and founder of the Mission Driven Mom. Now you and I both know that we are living in a very confusing, contradictory culture, and that mothers especially feel the weight of that every day because we are not only taking on the job of mothering, and we do not just have that responsibility going on, but we have the weight of what we were not given educationally and the perceptions that are out there about mothers in the culture.

The feminist movement and all the other things, besides which it is declining, and all the things. And so if you have ever wondered, like I have so many times, how you are supposed to lead your family with confidence when everything is unstable, then this episode is going to be for you. We are going to dive into that.

Now, I have said this before. I am going to say it again. We as moms want a better world. Now, maybe everybody does, but we have this special string connected to us called our child, and that child is going to inherit the world that we leave behind. And so we feel an added measure of responsibility and motivation to try to make the world a better place.

We know that this is a confusing culture, and we know that it lacks proper leadership, and that is one of the major problems. We are struggling to navigate it. We worry about what is going on and how to build the good society, and leadership is a big part of that.

I want to talk to you for a minute today about some things that several individuals said about the concept of servant leadership, how servant leadership is lacking, why it is lacking, why it is the answer, and what you and I can do about it.

As moms, Robert Greenleaf was a huge mover in this kind of modern day movement of bringing back this concept of servant leadership. He had an organization and one of the most popular books called Servant Leadership. He researched, it is the definitive book, you could say that, about this concept.

And he defined the problem in a way that I find very ironic because it is the problem that I keep talking about, and he says it really well. He says, alas, we live in the age of the anti leader and our vast educational structure devotes very little care to nurturing leaders or to understanding followership.

This is also something very fascinating that he focuses on in his book. We have a responsibility to be leaders, but also to be good followers and to be trained to know who to follow and how to follow them, and that both of those skills and abilities are necessary to have the kind of culture that we want.

He says, if there is any influence, formal education seems to discourage such pursuits. Educators argue, especially, I believe, that such preparation is implicit in general education. So educators claim that they teach people leadership, but they actually do not.

He says, if that is true, how can it be that we are in a crisis of leadership in which vast numbers of quote educated people make gross errors in choosing whose leadership to follow, and in which there is so little incentive for able and dedicated servants to take the risks of asserting leadership.

If we really, in our educational systems, are teaching people how to be good followers and how to be servant leaders, then why are we in this conundrum today. His point is we are not doing that, and that is a key part of the problem.

The conclusion I reach is that educators are avoiding the issue when they refuse to give the same care to the development of servant leaders as they do to doctors, lawyers, ministers, teachers, engineers, and scholars.

And he is right. Leadership is one of the most important things. Leadership is everything. Leadership makes or breaks us, and it is a vital skillset that should be taken as seriously as a medical practice, or as judges and attorneys, or any other major ability that is trained in individuals.

He continues. Even schools of administration give scant attention to servant leadership. I have spent a great deal of time and energy trying to persuade educators to accept the obligation, and I am certain that generally they recognize neither the obligation nor the opportunity. Thus far, in my experience, they appear unpersuadable.

An occasional gifted teacher will take some initiative, but the institutions rarely sanction the effort. The outlook for better leadership in our leadership poor society is not encouraging.

Amen.

And that is at the root. We talked about this in one of the episodes recently about hacking at the branches or hacking at the root. Servant leadership, there is a vacuum. There is almost no good leadership out there.

This is why servant leadership is a big chunk of like half of our focus in level three in the academy, because it is a skillset we desperately need.

This is a problem. We see this problem. If we were going to say, we look out on our society, we look at the nonsense going on social media, we see all of the, look, I try to go to the movies and I look at what is in the theater and over half of it just looks like junk.

It just looks like, why. It is not going to lift me, it is not going to elevate me. It is probably not going to teach me anything.

Now, maybe I am making too quick a judgment and maybe there is more that I can gain from some of these things that I turn away from. But frankly, there is much in our society that is not worth consuming, and there is much that gets put out in the name of entertainment that good leadership would quell.

We need people in all industries, in all parts of society, leading us closer to truth and goodness and beauty, infusing virtue back into our culture, if that is the kind of culture that we long for.

And as mothers, we have a part. We have a very important role to play in this.

And I know that we often sit at home and feel powerless and think society is what it is, and I am not a leader and I am never going to be one, and I am not going to hold the reins of government, so there is nothing I can do.

And actually, we can do everything. And I am going to tell you why that is the case.

So later on, Greenleaf has this to say, which the first time I read this, I was floored. I read it and reread it. I shared it with people that I knew. I put sections of this book in level three because it is, anyway, just listen to what he has to say.

So we are looking at the society, right, and we are super dissatisfied and we are like, what is going on in our culture. And we can maybe have the insight to recognize that the vacuum of leadership is a core root problem.

But then we might ask this question, which is the question he asks. Okay, if this is a situation we find ourselves in, then who is the enemy who is holding back more rapid movement to the better society that is reasonable and possible with available resources.

So we have all this technology, we have all this ability. What is holding us back. Why can we not get there. We will not be a perfect society, but we could be a way better society. So why are we not arriving. Who is responsible.

He goes on. For the mediocre performance of so many of our institutions, who is standing in the way of a larger consensus on the definition of the better society and paths to reaching it.

Not evil people. Not stupid people. Not apathetic people. Not the quote system. Not the protestors, the disruptors, the revolutionaries, or the reactionaries.

Are you surprised by what he says. That is quite a claim to make. That is pretty surprising that he is calling this out.

He sees the problem. He is obviously trying to do something about it. He is writing books, he is running organizations, he is training people.

He is saying we have a vacuum of leadership. We have a big, huge problem here. We have everything that we need to build a better society. We have natural laws and rights and a wonderful constitution and all the things.

What is holding us back. What is keeping us from doing it.

And it is not these things. The evil, stupid, apathetic people, or the system, or the protestors, the disruptors.

And he says part of the reason for that is because until we get to utopia, which we may never get there, those people will always exist in society. They cannot be the reason. They cannot be what is stopping us, because they will always be part of society.

He says no. Here is what it is.

He goes on. This is so mind blowing. Moms, the real enemy is fuzzy thinking.

This reminds me of this really awesome article by Mortimer Adler that I love, where he talks about how our inability to think clearly, to reason things out, to think in terms of principle, is at the heart of most of the problems that we find.

And this is a guy who has done his homework and is the leading expert in this field, and he has brought it down to wrong thinking.

Just like we talked about a couple episodes ago, how we changed your thinking about being a people pleaser, just by identifying one principle.

And so the real enemy to the good society is fuzzy thinking.

He goes on. Fuzzy thinking on the part of good, intelligent, vital people.

That is you and I. That is just the truth. We are good, vital, intentional, intelligent people who want a better, more virtuous world.

So we are, and it is our fuzzy thinking that is the problem. It is keeping us from having the leadership that we need to have that would bring about a better society.

Let me read that sentence again and finish it out.

The real enemy is fuzzy thinking on the part of good, intelligent, vital people and their failure to lead and to follow servants as leaders.

Our inability to identify the people who we should truly follow and champion, who can lead us to a better world, and our unwillingness to gain the ability to think clearly, to be true servant leaders and to lead, is the problem.

The people that can do it, that do not, are the problem.

Too many settle for being critics and experts. There is too much intellectual wheel spinning. Too much retreating into quote research. Too little preparation for and willingness to undertake the hard and high risk tasks of building better institutions in an imperfect world.

Too little disposition to see the problem as residing in here, and not out there.

I am going to talk to you about that in just a minute.

In short, the enemy to the better society that we all long for is strong natural servants who have the potential to lead but do not lead, or who choose to follow a non servant.

They suffer. Society suffers.

And so it may be in the future.

This is quite a little lecture, quite a hand slapping that we have had from Robert Greenleaf, but I absolutely agree with him.

You and I have the potential to know how to follow the right people and to become the leaders that we could be.

And our inability to think in terms of truths and principles, our fuzziness about what really needs to be done, as I say in the Seven Laws of Life mission, bringing principled solutions to real world problems, being mission driven servant leaders, is the problem.

Greenleaf also says the only way to change a society is to produce people, enough people, who will change it.

This reminds me of something that Jordan Peterson teaches often.

He spent many years thinking and pondering and studying about communism, especially as it played out in the far east nations like China and Russia.

And he kept asking himself, why. Why. Why did this happen. How do we stop it from happening again.

And he went through all the books and he had all the conversations and he thought and pondered endlessly until finally he came to one very simple truth. And that was that the only way to stop it from ever happening again was to produce people who would stop it from ever happening again.

To have more Ten Booms, to have more William Wilberforces.

And that is why in the Mission Driven Life, I talk about how ordinary people can do extraordinary things.

Because you and I feel very ordinary, but we can do extraordinary things, and we can be servant leaders, and we must be.

And I am going to tell you how to start in just a minute.

Greenleaf goes on to say this as well.

The servant, that is you and I striving to be servant leaders, views any problem in the world as in here inside themselves. That is what he means, inside oneself, and not out there.

He says this goes back to our principle with the boundaries in the recent podcast, right.

We thought the problem was out there and everybody was just giving us a hard time. And then we said, okay, maybe I should just put up more fences.

And then we realized, actually, if I will change my nature, if I will live according to principles, good, solid principles of boundaries, then things will just change.

He goes on. If a flaw in the world is to be remedied, to the servant, the process of change starts in themselves, in the servant, not out there.

This is a difficult concept for the busy, modern person. The busy modern woman. The busy modern mom.

Now I want to bring this home, because I have been talking for the last few minutes about the big picture of the culture and the society and all the things that feel so nebulous and out of our control.

But guess what.

Your family is a little society.

If you take all the big problems and questions that are out there in the world and you think and ponder for a minute about your little home, you will recognize that almost everything is reflected in the small society of the family.

The leaders. The rules. The laws. The choice and consequence. The relationships. The negotiations.

So many of the things that we have to do as a society, we also have to do in our homes.

And you are a leader right now.

You are a leader in the little society of your family.

And so since you are the leader, I want to ask you, how is it going.

What kind of world are you creating in your home, and maybe even more importantly, in your own head and in your own heart.

Leadership is always happening. It is just either good leadership or bad leadership. It is either servant leadership or it is selfish narcissism.

And since we are already leaders, we owe it to ourselves and we owe it to our families, and we owe it to the society that we now govern to be the best leaders we can be.

And so everything that Robert Greenleaf was talking about applies to you and I today. Right now.

Who are those individuals, those mothers, those women, that are going to change our society by changing the societies in our homes, starting with ourselves.

He says that we need natural leaders who have the potential to be servant leaders.

That is you.

You have the potential to be a servant leader, and I know that you are already doing some of that.

I know that you adore your family. I know that you try to serve them. I know that you try to put them first.

But this is like so many other things.

We hear words like servant leadership and we think we understand. We think we know. We think we get it. We think that it means doing more of this or that.

But until we slow down and think, until we get rid of the fuzzy thinking and we get into the principled thinking, it is going to be very difficult to course correct properly, to understand what actually is going well, what is not going well, and how we can course correct to live more truth in our homes.

And of course, how is this best done. It is best done through principles, of course.

Another book that I love is called The Servant. That one is by James Hunter. It is a beautiful analogy that teaches some really fantastic leadership principles.

And he says that leadership is very simple. It is one phrase.

Leadership is character in action.

We have been talking about character this month. We have been talking about Stephen Covey.

Remember that he said 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 basic principles into their character.

That is what the character ethic is.

And if character is everything in leadership, and character is developed through integrating principles into our nature, then we have our marching orders.

We know what we need to do.

As James Hunter says, you need to gain the skill for identifying the principle and moving it from your head.

So you are going to get rid of your fuzzy thinking and learn to identify them, and then gain the skills to move those principles from your head to your heart, to where you have true understanding and conversion to that truth, and into your habits so that it becomes a way of life.

It is just who you are. It is just what you do. It is how you talk. It is how you live. It is how you lead. It is how you govern those little people in your home.

And of course, Jack Barsin, who is a brilliant guy that I absolutely love, teaches all kinds of incredible things.

He said, and he is right, and I could give you a million other quotes around this. He said that the only thing we are teaching anybody is a principle.

And why would he say that.

Because it is true, because there are a million ways that we can live out any principle.

That is why you give them the truth and then the truth makes them free.

So how can we do that in the first place. How can we teach people principles if we do not know them ourselves. How can we lead with them.

How can our leadership be character in action if we are not truth seekers, if we have not become experts in our own life, if we are not discerners of truth, if we cannot build the small societies in our own heads and in our own homes based on true principles.

When you do this, it changes everything, because when there is proper leadership, everybody thrives.

In the next week, I am teaching a free class called How to Stop Feeling Powerless and Become the Expert in your own life.

And I really want you there.

It is the culmination of what we have been talking about for the last few weeks. It is going to be the deep dive that you really need. It is going to be a springboard for you to stop that fuzzy thinking, to start to dig into that character ethic, to begin to understand these ethereal, abstract things called principles and harness them.

Send your lasso out and grab them. Identify them, write them as actionable, and put them to practice in your own home.

So if you are ready to stop guessing, if you are ready to stop having other people tell you what to do, if you want to lead with confidence, then please join me. Register at the link below in the description, and I will see you there.

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 Rindlisbacher, 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 Rindlisbacher, 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 Rindlisbacher, 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.