Episode 9: Ah, boundaries.  They can be tricky, can't they?  Especially when setting them within our relationships.  It can feel SO much easier to just not even deal with them.  But, they are necessary for healthy relationships.  And when we can shift our perspective to seeing them for what they really are: doorways to what we’re available for that support and fortify our relationships, they get a little easier to navigate.   

Healing work is vital in helping us set boundaries. 

Healthy mental & emotional boundaries release us from the responsibility of other's emotional states. This isn't to say we are unkind to others or don't care about how they feel.  We do.  It's simply understanding that:

a) it's up to us to take care of ourselves, to meet our own needs and

b) we actually don't have control over how they feel. All of this comes with awareness as we do the healing work.  It is possible to be kind and firm.  It's letting other's know what we are available for, meaning, what type of behavior we will engage with.

As you consistently set & hold boundaries it frees up your energy to support the relationship.

So often we let go of our boundaries to avoid starting a fight or a tantrum.  Look, I get it.  I don't want to experience the uncomfortable feelings that often arise as boundaries are set & held.  But as you ignore a boundary, you are suppressing your needs.  And I promise the anxiety & guilt lessens as you hone this skill.  And again, as you do the healing work, you get better at regulating your own emotional state, making this process less triggering for you.  

You'll know if boundaries are needed in your relationship if you're feeling anger, frustration, and especially resentment.  Resentment is always a sign that you have given your power away & not held a boundary.  

The key is to set a boundary for yourself, not as a punishment for the other person.  

 They are what YOU will or won't do given the circumstances.  They don't require someone else to do something so that you get what you want.  They are all about personal responsibility.  Setting empowered boundaries is giving a clear path to others of what we are available for.  We get to choose to not engage when others aren't treating us how we'd like.  And we will choose to honor those boundaries as we value ourselves.  

When we can set them firmly yet with kindness & with a focus on connection they are SO much more effective.

Others will likely resist your new boundaries.  They might believe THEIR emotions are because of YOUR choices and they will try to put that on you. But with self-awareness, we can regulate our own emotional state & not take responsibility for others.  We grow in our self-confidence, trust & compassion for ourselves every time we hold a boundary.  Boundaries build our self-esteem because it takes courage to make yourself a priority.

Bottom line: Boundaries are a way to take care of ourselves. When we set boundaries, we’re less angry and resentful because our needs are getting met. Boundaries make our expectations clear, so others know what to expect from us and how we want to be treated. Boundaries are the foundation for happy, healthy relationships.

If you missed Episode 8: Boundaries Part 1: Why They feel SO Freaking Hard, check it out here.

If you’re loving what you’re hearing and you desire support between episodes and you’re not a member of the Thrive in Motherhood community, consider this your invitation to join.

Episode 8: Buckle up, Moms.  Today I'm talking boundaries.  Actually, I'll be talking boundaries for the next 3 weeks.  That's how important they are.  In fact, vital to healthy relationships.  And, we’re starting off with why they feel SO hard.  Which is one of the reasons why so many of us don't hold them.  Or at least don't hold them well.  Let's dig into why this is and why boundaries are SO important.  My intention is for you to be inspired to begin some boundary work of your own.  

Why we don't know what our boundaries are or how to hold them...

We all have needs.  Period.  And they matter.  But we learn at a young age to deny ourselves these needs in order to please others, get more love & affection, and feel safe in our family.  We decided there was a risk in having our own desires, wants, or needs.  Expressing them could mean a withdrawal of love, even if unintentional. (To learn more about why this happens, listen to episode# 3).  So we sacrifice our needs for others.  In the process, we let go of so much of ourselves that we don’t learn who we really are.  We learn to live from a false sense of self.  The result?  We don't know where our limits are & we never learned that it was safe to have boundaries. 

Instead, we learn to be responsible for other's emotional states.  When children see that mom is happy & loving when they "behave" but mom is angry, yelling & scary when they "misbehave" they see how they are affecting her emotions especially when they’re told “you’re making me so mad”.  It's important to understand this because when we believe that we can control others’ emotions, we allow them to control ours.  We are giving our power away.  Our emotional state is at the effect of other’s behaviors.   Bluntly put, we are victims of other's actions & our circumstances.

The way to restore our power, to restore our control, is through boundaries.  I'm not talking about exerting power over others, but rather claiming your power, claiming control, over yourself.  Because that is what boundaries are: empowered choices about what you will or won't do given a certain set of circumstances.  They are not about getting the other person to do/not do anything.  

A boundary is how WE will respond.

Personal boundaries are basic guidelines of how you want to be treated AND how you treat yourself.  They can be defined by the limits we set with other people which indicate what we find acceptable and unacceptable in their behavior towards us.  We get to decide what we are available for with others when it comes to their emotional state, their demands, their behavior.  We can hold ourselves responsible for our own choices.

The ability to know & hold healthy boundaries comes from a healthy sense of self-worth.  Self-worth is finding intrinsic value (not contingent on what other's think) in who you are.

From this place of valuing ourselves, we are able to honor our needs through boundaries.  Otherwise, we will continue to sacrifice ourselves and be resentful towards others about it.  

Boundaries are the ultimate self-care.  

We all have limits.  Boundaries communicate that line.  They give us a sense of agency over our physical space, body & feelings.  

Having boundaries allows you to make yourself a priority. 

Episode 7:  Hello and welcome back! I’m so jazzed to dive into today's topic.  It's all about connected empowered communication.  Do you ever feel at a complete loss on how to get through to your partner?  Your child?  You talk and talk and yet it seems to go nowhere.  

Well, my friend, this episode is for you.  

We’re going to talk about how you’re sabotaging your relationships through communication, what to look out for, and how to cultivate connected communication.  I can't emphasize this enough: This is a relationship game-changer.   

How does empowered communication differ from victim mentality communication? 

Victim mentality communication is reacting to other's emotions.  It's needing others to do/say/act in a certain way so we can feel calm.  Most of us live here most of the time.

Connected, empowered communication is being responsible for your feelings.  It’s honoring your boundaries.  It’s extending compassion & empathy towards others while holding them as capable of being responsible for their feelings.  

It’s an awareness that we’re having our own, unique experience & so is everyone else.

Awareness that our experience is the only thing we really have control over.  This is how we stay calm amidst other’s big emotions.

"Connected/empowered communication is the ability to state your needs. To maintain compassion and empathy along with an awareness that everyone has their own reality.  It's stepping out of having to defend your position."

"It is seeking to understand vs. be understood or be right"

"It is letting go of the responsibility of anyone else's emotional state"

Ah, yes. Freedom. This allows us to find calm.  Not only does this feel better for us, but in doing so, we are inviting others to do the same.  Because here is the thing...we lead with our energy.  

"Your ability to return to your inner calm is where your influence in your communication lies."  

So often when we feel overwhelmed & out of control we react with rigidity & inflexibility, creating the power struggle.  But in calm, we can communicate what we need and not take other’s reactions personally, diffusing the battle for control.

Instead, creating connection.  This connection brings more cooperation & a greater willingness to see the other side.

Continue reading at irenemckennacoaching.com/podcast/007

Join the community at thriveinmotherhoodcommunity.com

Episode 6: I’m SO excited to share today’s episode with the amazing Alison Jamison.  She’s a life & confidence coach who helps us understand the importance of cultivating our inner confidence.  She helps misfits slay their inner critics, create kick-ass confidence, and take action to be the heroes of their own stories. 

She helps her clients let go of their baggage, claim confidence, and complete the quest of making their dreams come true. We talk all about self-doubt...where it comes from, the inevitability of it & how what we do with it is what really matters.  Alison is a firm believer that teaching & modeling self-confidence is one of the best gifts we can give to our children.  

For her whole life, Alison never felt like she fit in anywhere.  There were all these parts of her which only seemed to fit in a little here, a little there.  She felt unaccepted.  Like she didn’t belong anywhere. She was always uncomfortable and never at ease anywhere.  But having her son changed all that.    

“I wanted to demonstrate for him how I want him to feel about himself.”

As she saw her son as pure perfection, she began to wonder why she didn’t think about herself that same way. She realized she was seriously lacking confidence and decided to do something about it.  

  “I wanted to know who I was without reference to someone else."  

She so wisely explains that we have this drive to belong (so we conform ourselves to fit in), yet we also have that inner voice saying, “this is not who you are”.  So we get confused.  Confused about who we really are.  I love this insight so much because it brilliantly explains why so many of us feel insecure.  We don’t even know who we are.  So, as always, the work starts with us.  

She says the path to self-confidence is shifting how you think about yourself, being willing to feel all the feels, and trusting yourself that you do know what’s best for you.  Trusting you do know how to show up for yourself, to have your own back. 

Want to read on and get the link to Alison's amazing free gift? Head over to irenemckennacoaching.com/podcast/006

Join the community at thriveinmotherhoodcommunity.com

Episode 5:  I'm so glad you're joining me today because  I had the opportunity to chat with my friend Kelly Haugh. 

 Kelly is a Certified Holistic Health and Wellness Coach, Stress Resilience and Mental Wellness Trainer, Nutritional Psychology Practitioner, Certified Life Coach, Speaker, Author, and Mental Health Advocate.    In other words, she knows her stuff. 

 Kelly shared with me her story of radically transforming her life when she made changing how she interacted with her stress a priority.  She had been living with severe physical manifestations of her chronic stress.  Her stress had been compounding and accumulating in her body for years as she was trying desperately to juggle all the balls.  It began to come out in physical symptoms.   

She knew she needed to take charge & figure out how to manage her stress without it wreaking havoc on her body.  She began slowly with mediation & vagus nerve exercises and she started noticing improvements.  She continued, adding new practices along the way to support the stress reduction & her overall wellness.   

She began to think that just maybe she could turn this around and her biggest desire today is to leave listeners with a sense of hope.  

Kelly says it becomes imperative to pay attention to the small steps we can take, the small changes on our path to wellness so that we stay the course.   Because doing the work to get to wellness can feel really hard to do.  Instead of getting caught up in needing to do self-care perfectly or all at once, start where you can. 

Allow this to build momentum to create the space & energy to do more. A little, plus a little, plus a little, create a lot. 

Read the rest of the show notes plus grab access to Kelly's amazing free download "3 Easy Ways to Get Out of Fight or Flight" here!

Episode 4: Hi friends! Thriving in motherhood means thriving in all your relationships. 

When you have a partner, that relationship is vital to your well-being.  In this episode, I'm applying a lot of the same perspectives & ideas that I've shared to the partner relationship.  

If you're not currently involved in a romantic partnership, I invite you to consider any close relationship in your life.  What I share with you has been a game-changer for my marriage.  With an open mind, I trust that you will see your partner & yourself a bit differently after listening to this one.  It might just be what you need to hear.

In my journey, I dove into motherhood first.  It felt more pressing. My children were relying on me to regulate myself.  It felt really hard.  A big part of that "hard" was that I had a partner who wasn't on board with how I wanted to parent.  I mean, he agreed with the concepts but he found it difficult to remain calm & find ways to parent that fostered connection.  His dis-regulation made my job as a mom harder. He made it harder for me to stay calm. I blamed him.  I was resentful.  But here's the thing...it was easier to project onto him all the ways he was getting it wrong and blame him for it being so hard rather than to admit I was having the same struggles.

"I held him to a standard of parenting I hadn't yet mastered myself." 

The perspective shift that changed my relationship with my husband AND also the relationship between my husband and our boys was this...

A woman's driving need is to feel loved & a man's driving need is to feel respected. 

When these needs aren't met, a cycle of disconnection is created.  This comes up in parenting as you correct, direct, tell them how it needs to be done.  This is done out of concern.  You just know better.  He only needs to realize that we'd be happier & things would be easier if we just did it my way.  (Realizing I was doing this was a rude awakening for me.)

Our approach is perceived by our partner as disrespectful. This corrodes connection & pokes holes in their confidence. Making it hard to want to express love from this place.  So you aren't getting what you need to feel connected.  

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.  

We end up waiting on them, needing them to give us what we're needing to give ourselves.  In this waiting the resentment builds and we become more and more unwilling to give them what they need.  

We don't feel like it.  Neither do they.  Who knows where this cycle started?  Who cares?  You're both in it.  Someone has to break it.  

If you want things to change, you go first.  

Welcome to the conversation!

Episode 2: I'm super excited about today's episode because I get to talk about my favorite topic. Reactivity.  I can talk about this topic all day long. About how our brains work and triggers the stress response that drives our reactivity.

Moms want so much to be more patient, yet, what if having enough patience wasn't the goal? I'm going to introduce you to what I call patience fatigue and empowered parenting.  We're going to dive deep into the inner work we must do to create the change we desire.  For ourselves & for our families.  

Reactivity simply stated is the activation of our stress response. We're then trained to look outward to explain our reaction. We see life happening & we react to it.

What I truly want you to know is this... reactivity's never about the outside world, but about what’s going on within you.  

Reactivity is demanding the world shape up so we get what we want. We're stuck waiting for everything and everybody else to change so that we get what we want. We focus on what our children or our partners are doing/not doing. We're giving our power away. 

“Reacting is human.  It's a biological process. It's part of who we are as humans.”

The stress response is a primal one.  It isn't going away.  Yet, when the goal's to simply try and have more patience when faced with a triggering situation, we will at some point always fall short.  This is patience fatigue.  

Patience fatigue comes because we're using up our reserves all day. Our trigger for reactivity gets shorter and shorter as the day goes on.  No wonder bedtime sucks.  There will never be enough patience.   This is why it's time to change the approach.

Episode 3: Welcome back! Today I talk about failure and why I KNOW you’re not failing…yes, even though I don’t know you. 

Let's chat about how your internal programming is created early in childhood and creates the very path to the guilt that paralyzes us as moms. This programming then gets carried into adulthood and becomes how we view ourselves as mothers intertwined with our children’s behavior. 

We're going to untangle the mom guilt (this can be tough, I’m not going to lie), to open a door that wasn’t visible before. The door that is our access to calm & expressing the love (that I KNOW you have for your children) in a bigger way because we are no longer living in the “shoulds” of motherhood.  I'm going to flip the script on what it means to be a good mom and invite you to a new way of seeing yourself.

Humans have a primal need to maintain love, safety & belonging. It's absolutely fascinating to me the way in which children will develop strategies to keep these intact. And the thing is, we all start life the same...with the primitive, survival part of our brain fully developed & the higher functioning, critical thinking part of our brain completely undeveloped.

The thing is that the survival part of the brain has no filter of what is truth and what isn't and as children we make generalizations and interpretations of our experiences that lead to over 70% of our beliefs being limiting, disempowering, and self-sabotaging.

This is part of our human journey. And this is why so many of us feel like we are failing. All.The.Time. And why we're left desperately searching outside of ourselves to validate our worth.

Episode 1: Let's get this party started! I am so completely jazzed to jump into this inaugural episode of The Thrive in Motherhood Podcast!

I believe I get to thrive and I want my children to thrive. These don't have to be mutually exclusive.  Yet, how many of us are giving to depletion? Taking care of everyone while losing ourselves. You want to be in the "Good Moms Club" and you're stuck trying to figure out what that actually means all the while losing pieces of yourself.

How do we possibly do life as a mom and survive, let alone thrive?!  Is it even possible?  I'm not an expert (and certainly not of your unique family) but I do know that if we want our experience to change, the work is always on us…not our children, not our partner, not the world.  This isn't one more thing to do. This is being empowered to create the change we desire.

I want to blow the mystique off of personal development and get into the nitty-gritty of personal growth work.  All the while keeping it real and allowing it to be messy.    Because that’s the truth of it.  IT.IS.MESSY.  and hard. It takes commitment and I'm here to walk alongside you.

This is not a “how-to-personal-growth” podcast.  This is a “let’s-have-a-conversation” podcast.  I'm bringing my insights and perspective from my experience as a mom, as a parenting coach, and reading all the personal growth books I can get my hands on.    I’ll be chatting with experts (and moms) about the game-changing insights that help them to thrive (and can help you too!).  I’m even doing live coaching sessions episodes (maybe it’ll be you!)

This is not about your children.  This is about you. The work you do will impact your children in a BIG way.  In the best possible way.

I'm obsessed with creating my best life.  I'm obsessed with doing the work to create an experience of motherhood that is fulfilling all while being a badass mom.  I'm obsessed with sharing what I learn with as many moms as I can because we ALL get to thrive.

What if motherhood was really all about how to SHOW your children what it looks like to live FULLY?  What would happen if you brought THAT to the job of raising your children?  What an amazing world that would be.

Welcome to the conversation.  I'm so happy you're here.

Join the community: Thrive in Motherhood