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Family Looking Up


Nov 21, 2017

We are talking today to Molly Claire.  Molly Claire is a certified Life Coach specializing in motherhood and offers special programs for newly divorced moms.  She focuses on the unique challenges moms face from time management and productivity, to the worries , guilt and overwhelm that can wreak havoc on personal well-being.  Molly's emphasis on mindset and the way it impacts every aspect of our lives offers a coaching process that helps her clients make eating changes from the inside out.

We start the episode by asking Molly to explain the CTFAR model:

Everything we do in our life come all stems from the way are thinking about our life.  The way that we think creates feelings, and our feelings drive our actions, and our actions drive our results.  For example: thing to lose weight.  Lets say you have the thought, "I will never lose weight."  When you think that, it causes you to feel hopeless.  When you are feeling hopeless you end up eating more and work out less. Which proves that original thought.  Molly uses that model to find out why we are feeling frustrated. We need to get a new perspective to create new feelings in our life.

First trap of Motherhood: Mom Autopilot

Mom Autopilot is an automated state that we run on.  It all starts when we brought home the our first child.  All of a sudden we are responsible for every need of another human being. What happens is the mom autopilot helps you get through sleep deprivation and colic, however over time it becomes not so useful. Beasue we get in the habit of taking care of things for our kids that they don't need us to do.  We might put more things in our to-do list than we need to.  This isn't just with our kids.  This is in our communities, in church.  Wherever people ask things of us and we take it on immediately. The way this shows up in motherhood is taking on the problem of solving our kids emotions.  Think about the last time your kids come to you with a problem.

One of the other traps is the trap of believing that we are responsible for making our kids happy.  When we can shift into a place that it is totally normal for our kids to have emotional ups and down and it is not our job to fix it, then we can allow that space for them to be upset and we don't have to be upset.  If we can let people have their emotions then we can respond to situations better.  Kids are going to have negative emotions about half the time. We can choose how we feel.

Trap: Attaching your kids success to our happiness

We feel good when someone compliments our kids.  As moms we feel with many more negatives then positives.  Motherhood is a thankless job.  We have to be our own cheerleaders.  It is easy to get a feel good when someone says something good about our kids.  We make it mean that we are doing a good job when they have a success. The problem is when our kids do something terrible, then we feel like a failure.  We feel inadequate.  Separate our how you show up as a mom.  For example: It is important to me to teach my kids to be kind to other people. But my kids decide what to do with that teaching, whether they actually are kind or not. So we need to draw the line between what is our responibility and what is our kids responsibility.  When we can let go of taking credit for our kids success we can let go of taking credit of their failures and allow them to take credit for their own success.  We can let go of trying to control them, because control never works anyway.  Kids will take more ownership of it.  We can't create success for our kids anyway, When we see failure as part of success it makes it so much easier.  The founder and CEO of Spanx attributes her success to her dad.  Everyday he would say, "what did you fail at today."  We don't have to think of failure as a negative thing.  When we can think about it that way with our kids it is not as upsetting.  The more failures they have, the more success they can have.  It is so freeing.  It will also help your relationship with your kids.  If we are taking ownership of their failures, then we will be desperate to have them not fail or cover it up.  They will feel that.  If you feel really loved, it is much easier to love your kids despite what they do if you aren't worried about their failure.

Trap 6: Victim Mentallity

Think about so much is asked of us as a mom.  We start having a dialog in our head that we have do so many things, and it is not fair.  Falling into a victim mentality is when we act as if, and think as if, we don't have a choice.  But we can realize, we always have a lot of choices.   Recognize your choices and the more you do that, you will feel less like a victim.  This helps us realize the WHY of why we became a mom.

To learn about the rest of the mom traps, read Molly's book: The Happy Mom Mindset

To learn more about Molly, visit her website at Mollyclaire.com

 

Mom Squad Challenge: Remember to recognize your choices.  Think today about where you are succeeding.  It is easy to recoznize our failures, but today ask yourself where am I succeeding and focus on that.

Beth's book recommendation: The Shepherd's Song by Larry Barkdull