Decide to Practice Self-Kindness By Choosing Your Thoughts
In Episode 9 of The Business Mamas Podcast, I introduced a Framework for Enhanced Well-Being - Focus on Beliefs, Relationships & Making Heart-Guided Decisions.
By using this framework, I have been able to unlock the incredible peace that comes with being present in my work, with my kids, and in other aspects of my life as well. By having empowering beliefs, and empowering relationships, that naturally leads to being empowered to make heart -guided decisions. When you have empowering beliefs, and empowering relationships with yourself and others, you are setting yourself up to value yourself, to know your truth, and then to honor yourself and your truth by making heart-guided decisions.
Today, I want to talk with you about making the heart-guided decision to boldly practice self-kindness, by choosing your thoughts. There is one incident that sticks out in my mind, as an example of when I chose my thoughts, and boldly practiced self-kindness. I'm going to share it with you in hopes that you can use this story and these tools to boldly practice self-kindness, and choose your thoughts as well.
It was the night before Halloween, some years ago, and I realized that I'd forgotten to buy pumpkins for my kids to carve. I arrived at the grocery store at 8:30pm after a long day of work, only to find that the regular-sized pumpkins, the kind that you use for carving, had already been sold. I was so disappointed. I thought about my kids. They were three years old and six years old at the time, and I thought about what I was going to tell them. “Mommy forgot to get the pumpkins.” I was so, so sad. I took a deep breath. At that point, I decided to focus on finding a solution.
At this time, these years ago, when I was experiencing this, I actually wasn't very practiced at allowing my feelings. I was much more practiced at bypassing and ignoring my feelings, and trying to forge ahead. So now, a couple of years later, I actually think that I would have allowed those feelings a little bit more space. I was so sad. I felt so disappointed in myself. The story I was telling myself was that Halloween was a really big deal for kids. It was a really special night for them and if they didn't have pumpkins to carve, that it wasn't going to be special. It wasn't going to be this special Halloween experience that that I had always imagined it would be. The feelings that were coming up for me were feelings of not being good enough, and feelings of failing at the work-life mom balance that I was trying to juggle. It was a feeling of having the two little people in the world that mattered the most to me not getting what I felt like was the best that I wanted to be giving them.
What was really coming up for me was a flood of emotions of, you're not a good enough mom, that you're not giving your children what they need, or what they deserve. I didn't give my emotions the space when this happened a couple years ago. But I'm actually giving myself, the space to feel those feelings right now. The “you're not being good enough for your kids as a mom” feeling is a heavy feeling. What I'm going to say to myself now, which I didn't say to myself back then is, “it's okay. It's okay to feel that feeling. I'm a safe place. My body is a safe place to feel that feeling of grief, of disappointment, that feeling of not feeling good enough. I see you feeling those feelings, and it's okay. “
Now, having just given myself the space right now, to feel those feelings about what happened on this day before Halloween a couple of years ago, I actually feel lighter, and happier and more at peace, because I allowed myself to feel my feelings.
Now, I'll tell you what I did back then, because I still think that the steps that I chose back then, even though I really wasn't allowing myself to go deep into those feelings, were still useful. I'm going to tell you about how I boldly practiced self-kindness by choosing my thoughts. The next thing that I did was after briefly allowing myself to say mean things to myself about how I should have planned further ahead in my preparations for Halloween was that I took a deep breath and I decided to focus on finding a solution.
That's when I saw a bin filled with mini pumpkins. I grabbed a few, deciding that arriving home with mini pumpkins seemed better than arriving home with no pumpkins at all. As I pulled up into our driveway and sat in my car, I took a deep breath in, and I exhaled. As I exhaled, I released the disappointment that I had in myself for arriving home late. As I exhaled, I released the frustration that I felt over the fact that the pumpkins I had wanted to purchase were sold out. The past had come and gone. And this was the one moment that I had right now. I let the weight of those things leave my heart, and I opened up my heart to the opportunities for joy and connection that waited for me just inside my home.
The experience that I went through a couple years ago, when I sat in my driveway, and I had the mini pumpkins and I was getting ready to walk into my home was an experience of release. I knew then that I needed to release; I needed to release the disappointment; I needed to release the bad feelings. Back then, I was saying, “okay, release this, release this, don't focus on it and let it go. “ That served me well enough in that moment. The distinction that I'm explaining is that by actually allowing the space to really feel those feelings and to make a safe space for those feelings, the release actually just comes naturally on its own. What then happened was I opened up the door, and I stepped inside, and my little boys welcomed me with hugs and kisses, and we jumped into pumpkin coloring and carving action. I was excited when I told them “You each get three pumpkins instead of one!” Since I was excited, they were excited too.
That's the kind of magic that awaits us when we are kind to ourselves. Instead of focusing on feeling defeated about the lack of normal-sized pumpkins, I opened my eyes to other possibilities. I looked for a workable alternative and I found one. Essentially, what I was choosing to do in this moment was I was choosing to focus on self-kindness, rather than self-criticism. So, when you feel self-criticism coming up for you in the moment, what I would invite you to do is, first, allow those feelings. Tell yourself that you’re a safe place and that your body is a safe place to feel those feelings, and allow yourself that.
After you've done that, then you may have noticed that those feelings transition into lighter, more peaceful feelings. What I want to give you now is a tool for how you can choose your thoughts.
The combination of allowing your feelings and then also knowing that you get to choose your thoughts is a beautifully magical combination.
I learned this framework many years ago, probably a decade ago at a seminar, and I want to share it with you today. It's called stop, look, choose and vote.
I'm going to use the example of the Halloween pumpkin debacle as a way of explaining it to you in the hopes that you can then take this framework and try it out in your life and see if it works for you.
STOP (and feel)
The first part is stop. If you're starting to go down a bad road of self-criticism, like I suck for not buying pumpkins earlier, or something similar to that, the first thing you do is to stop going down that road. So, pause and take note of where you're at. Now, this is where I'm going to change a little bit of what I did back then. Like I said, a couple of years ago, I wasn't feeling my feelings in the way that I am now.
Stop and feel. Allow that feeling. Be with it.
Make sure that your body knows that it's safe for you to feel those feelings. You can tell yourself this out loud.
Take deep breaths, allow yourself to feel be with that feeling.
Take multiple deep breaths, maybe five in a row.
Now you are on your way to slowing everything down.
LOOK
The next step after you stop is to look. Now that you've stopped, look around. What are the options that you have in front of you? Consider those available options. Look for the paths that you can take. Because if you're in this place of self-criticism, it's probably that something hasn't gone exactly how you had wanted it to go. When you look around, there are going to be options forward and steps that you can take.
CHOOSE
Choose. Now that you've considered your options, you get to choose which option you will select. Going back to the sold-out carving pumpkins situation, one option was that I could have bought a bottle of hard liquor gone home with my head down, put the kids to bed with an air of total disappointment. Then after they were in bed, I could have drank myself into a place of forgetting or not caring about how I disappointed myself in them. Alcohol, drugs, and numbing with television or social media scrolling can all be used to try to escape from the self-critical feelings that we don't want to feel anymore. A slightly less dramatic choice but still a self-harming choice would have been after seeing the regular-sized pumpkins were gone, I could have stormed out of the grocery store, cussing under my breath that life sucks for me as a working mom, who doesn't have enough time to prepare for Halloween in the way that my kids deserve. This route would maybe not have been quite as self-destructive as the other option I just mentioned about the alcohol drinking, but it still would have left me feeling like crap. Plus, it would have caused me to stop looking for opportunities to make things better. Another option is to make the most of what I have before me: mini pumpkins, and little kids who are happy to have quality time with me doing something fun.
VOTE
Vote. I chose to make the most of the night with the mini pumpkins and I chose to vote to focus on the fun and the connection that I had and the opportunity to create with my boys.
Life will constantly present us with opportunities to tear ourselves down and to see life both as something we are failing at and something that others are messing up for us but when instead, we stop and feel, look, choose, and vote to do the things that are kind to ourselves, we show up and we create so much beauty in the world.
On this night before Halloween, I chose to be kind to myself. That choice felt nourishing to me then and now in reflecting on that night, I know that by modeling self-kindness I teach my boys how to be kind to themselves. Plus, the results were a magical Halloween Eve. I believe that this magic awaits us all if we allow it into our lives by voting for kindness, moment after moment, and day after day.
If you enjoyed Episode 21 and this blog post, I would love it if you shared the blog or the podcast with someone you think could benefit from them. I would also be incredibly grateful if you could leave an honest rating and review of The Business Mamas Podcast on Apple Podcasts as that helps more people find the show and it helps me in sharing this message of practicing self-love and self-care with more people whose lives I know could be enriched by hearing it. Sign up to download my Morning Routine Guide and receive my twice-monthly newsletter at The Business Mamas Podcast. Until next time and with gratitude, Kara Stein-Conaway, @karasteinconaway on Instagram.
