Managing expectations during the holidays (part 2)

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Everyone has opinions about the holidays and trying to manage everyone’s expectations creates a very exhausting and overwhelming holiday season. To feel present and balanced during the holidays you must be do things you want to do. You have two options when it comes to managing other’s expectations this holiday season and in this episode I will break down each of them. Own your holiday experience and let other’s own theirs. This is part 2 of the 3-part series on balance during the holidays.

Topics in this episode:

  • Your only 2 options to managing other’s expectations

  • Turkey meals, a 90-year-old grandmother and a fight for holiday happiness

  • Ownership over your holidays

  • Why you can’t make others happy

  • How to shift other’s expectations so they become something you want to do

Show Notes:

  • The “Be present and calm this holiday season challenge” is starting in the Ambitious and Balanced Working Mom Collective. This challenge will ensure you create a present and calm holiday season with daily audio reflections, 1:1 coaching support and a simple daily practice. We start December 6th. Join the Collective or learn more at: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/collective.

  • Episode references: Have to vs. want to – www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/10

  • Episode reference: Failure and disappointing others – www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/9

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Transcription

Hey, working moms. How did Thanksgiving go? Last week in the podcast, I walked you through my action plan for having a satisfying and present Thanksgiving. And my action plan kind of looked like this. I needed to be thinking "this is exactly what I want" - which is going to create feelings of being satisfied. And then from a place of feeling satisfied, I would prioritize conversations over a clean house. I would invite others to cook alongside me so I'm never alone in the kitchen. I would plan a game for full family participation, the young and the old. I would not be cleaning and cooking all day. I would not be in the kitchen alone. I would not be refilling everyone's glasses all the time. And the result of this plan, I had a very pleasant and full Thanksgiving experience. And I really do hope the same for you as well.

A lot of what we talked about last week in the podcast was taking ownership over your holidays and your ability to be present in them. I don't want you depending on perfect circumstances and everything running smoothly., and everything being clean, and everything being prepared and on time for you to have a very present and calm season.

No one else dictates if you have the kind of holiday experience that you want. That is all on you.

And to be honest, I really think that's the best news ever. You don't have to map out everything and get everything right and cross all your T's and dot all your I's and make sure you get all the perfect presents and send the holiday cards to everyone, and you don't have to worry about the supply chain issues. You just simply get to create the present and calm and peaceful holiday experience that you want, no matter the chaos around you.

And that is possible, because to create that magical feeling of being present and satisfied during the holidays, you know that feeling that we all want - that comes from the way you think.

Now if you didn't listen to last week's podcast, for sure, you're going to want to go back and listen to that one after we finish here today, because today is part two of what was going to be a two-part series around creating balance and being present during the holidays. But I decided to expand that into three parts. The series is focusing on the three most common things that keep us from being present during the holiday season.

Now I know as ambitious women that this is the experience we all want during the holidays. We want the holidays to be full. We want to do lots of activities, but we want to be present for all of it. We want to shut down our work brain, not just the paid work in our job, but our unpaid work as well as moms and partners and sisters and daughters and friends. We want the holidays to feel very satisfying and balanced. I know how challenging a time this can be for us as ambitious women that tend to lead a lot of things and do a lot of things and say yes to a lot of things. And so starting December 6 - that's essentially three weeks before Christmas - I am running a Be Present During the Holidays challenge. Now this is a challenge I am running for all of the women inside the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Collective. And besides the usual five step process and weekly coaching, there will be daily emails, five-minute audio prompts, additional one on one coaching opportunities - all for those inside the program. So the challenge starts on Monday, December 6, so you're going to want to join in order to get access to all of that additional support through the holiday. The doors to the collective are open. You can go to: RebeccaOlsonCoaching.com/collective - and of course, I'm going to put that in the show notes as well, and I cannot wait to see you inside.

Now last week, I talked a lot about the need to get things just right in order to be present. Now last week, I talked about how the need to get things just right kind of gets in the way of us being present because it focuses on us trying to create a perfect set of circumstances. And in today's episode, we're going to focus on the second thing that gets in the way of us feeling balanced over the holidays, and that is needing to meet everyone's expectations. Next week, we're going to focus on the last one, which is the need to do everything and do it all and do it all for our kids.

Now I talk a lot about ownership with my clients and my students: ownership over your emotions and your experiences of the life that you want. The most useful thing to believe is that you are 100% in control of feeling balanced this holiday season - 100% in control. Now, if you're thinking that you can only experience balance and be present, as long as your husband helps out around the house, or as long as your mom doesn't bring up politics, or as long as your son doesn't have a meltdown during dinner, as long as you're not stuck doing the dishes, then you are not fully in control of balance. You're thinking that you need some sort of circumstance to be a certain way or somebody else to do something for you to experience that balance. That's not you being 100% in control.

Now the same is true for everyone else in your family. You don't need to be doing anything for them, for them to have the holiday experience that they want. That's up to them to create - to own it.

Because what might make you feel satisfied and peaceful and calm and present over the holidays may or may not be what will make your mother-in-law feel satisfied and peaceful, or your dad or your brother or your kids or your spouse. Everyone is entitled to feel whatever they want about the holidays.

It's actually not your job to make them feel anything. Isn't that freeing? It's not even your job to create an environment where they could feel that way. In the same way that you are responsible for creating a holiday experience where you feel satisfied and balanced, your family and friends and your kids, whomever you spend the holidays with - it is their responsibility to create a holiday experience where they feel what they want to feel.

So, this is really important to understand: you take ownership over your own feelings, and everyone else takes ownership over theirs.

There are a lot of expectations over the holidays. Everyone has opinions about what they want. What makes the holiday special for them, what traditions they want to continue on - there is no possible way for you to create the holiday experience that everyone else wants, not even for your kids.

So, let's talk about managing expectations. I want to share a story with you about navigating my grandmother's love for turkey.

My grandmother passed away last year in 2020, but she loved Turkey. I remember having turkey at pretty much every holiday meal that I can remember since I was a kid - Easter Thanksgiving, Christmas, birthdays - we had it all the time. Now as my grandmother got older and she did less and less cooking, I did more and more of the cooking over the holidays. I don't really like turkey all that much. But of course, I would cook it for her because that is what she wanted. That is what she expressed to me.

Now I am a cook. I express myself through food I get a lot out of the experience of cooking food. It's very satisfying to me. Now I'm also very experimental with my food. I eat a lot of different types of food. I like cooking lots of new recipes and doing lots of things. But every holiday, we had to have turkey and mashed potatoes and stuffing and green beans and pie and Waldorf salad, and all of the usual stuff, most of which I don't even really care for, or I wouldn't cook if it was my decision. And I remember one Christmas, I made pork roast instead of turkey, and I heard about that for months, months and months.

Eventually I realized how this "I have to make turkey for my grandmother” mentality was really negatively affecting my holiday experience. I had to cook turkey and I didn't want to; and I was feeling bitter, and I was feeling frustrated about it.

And I was giving a lot of control of how I felt during the holidays to my grandma and this one thing.

And I didn't like the way I was feeling about the holidays and all the icky negativity that was surrounding it for me. So eventually, I took ownership over it. I very consciously thought of all of my options. First option, I could actually opt out of the meal altogether and not attend Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter or whatever holiday. Now I know that that probably sounds pretty extreme to you., but it's really important to get down to like the basics first. I have to see it as an option, that I am actually choosing to participate in the holiday, I could opt out and thus cook whatever I wanted. Or I can opt in and participate in the holidays. That is my decision. Because when you choose something, you take ownership over it. So, I had to get back to the basics. Of course, I was going to attend the holidays with my family, that is what I wanted. So, with that decision out of the way, the next decision was to decide how did I want to handle this meal being the one that cooks it. The one thing I was not going to do was I was not going to make my grandmother change her desire for turkey, it is what she loves. She is old, she was in her 90s by the time she died, this is what she wanted and what she loved. I was never going to change that for her, she was always going to want turkey. Also, I was not going to stay bitter about it anymore.

So, thinking about the options for the meals, here's what I could do - I could make two separate meals, one to satisfy the turkey lover, and one for me, and I did that a few times. I could make what I wanted to make and let my grandmother be upset. I did that to - aka the pork roast meal - I could even order like a do-it-yourself kind of meal service where we had a little bit of ham, we had a little bit of turkey, we had a little bit of a bunch of things - we did that one year as well, so all the cooking I didn't want to do didn't fall to me. Or I could just make turkey and shift my thoughts about why I was making turkey, so I didn't feel so bad about it.

When I took ownership, I saw options. Options to be in control of the way I felt about the holiday meal and about the overall experience of that holiday.

Now ultimately, what I decided was that my grandmother didn't really have all that many years left in her; and I would rather her love her holiday meal and get the exact food that she wants to eat, than me cook what I want to cook. And I felt really good about that decision. Here were some of my thoughts about it. She's in her 90s. I know how much she loves the holidays; I know how much she loves turkey, I could actually see her face, and how much she enjoyed everybody around the table eating turkey together.  I have the smile on my face as I'm actually even talking about it and thinking about it, because it brought her so much joy. And it brings me joy to think about that. I could see my kids with their black olives stuck on their fingers, because of course, we had to have, you know, a bowl of black olives in the middle of the table when we had turkey. I can remember myself as a kid having olives on all of my 10 fingers, and my grandmother scolding me for putting all those on my fingers. There's some genuine joy that comes up when I think about that meal, and I think about some of my past holiday experience with that meal. And when I started thinking about it in that way, thinking about wanting to give my grandmother this experience, thinking about how much joy came from my childhood and that experience, and how much joy comes from my kids enjoying that experience. Now, I wasn't just doing it for her, I was doing it for me.

And that's a really big distinction to see - the difference between doing something for you, versus doing something for others.

One feels very forceful, feels very obligatory, and the other feels very joyful, feels very calm, it makes you feel happy. Many of us have holiday traditions and family members that like things in very specific ways. And feeling like we have to do something for somebody else that does not create the kind of balanced and present holiday experience that we all want.

So, when you start thinking about other people's expectations - the things that you do for other people during the holidays - you might decide to do things their way, because you want to do them. But you have to get to that place of really wanting it genuinely wanting it and being really sold on it. It can't just be because it's easier. You have to generate some actual desire. The way you're going to know that you get there is how you feel while doing it.

When I started to make turkey because I wanted to make it for my grandmother, it didn't feel bad anymore. It felt like something I was doing out of a place of love. It didn't feel forced, it didn't have all of those icky feelings. That's because I was able to get my brain to a place where I saw it as a choice, I was making to bring love and joy to somebody else. And that filled me back up again. Now if you can't get there, if there is an expectation, if there is something that somebody else wants, and you can't bring yourself to a place to find some genuine desire to do that thing, then you shouldn't do it.

A life where you're always doing for others because you have to - it's not a balanced life. It's a forceful life. It's a life for others, it's a sacrificial life.

Now what this means is that some people are going to be disappointed and that's okay. It's not your responsibility to ensure that everyone has the holiday experiences that they want. That is their job. That's their responsibility. If this is hard for you, if this kind of triggers you to think about somebody else being disappointed in you, I have a podcast specifically on this. It's episode nine about failure and disappointing others. I'm going to link to that in the show notes for you. But for now, what I want you to walk away with is that you need to let other people own their emotions, if they want to be disappointed because you didn't send out Christmas cards this year, let them be. If they want to be upset because you didn't attend the holiday party - that's okay, let them be. If they want to be angry, because you opted out of the gift exchange this year, that's okay.

Now you have two choices when it comes to managing other people's expectations - we talked about both of them here. You can get on board with their expectations so that meeting, it becomes something that you want to do, something that's life giving to you. and know that when you do that, it no longer actually becomes that person's expectation. Instead, it becomes your own, it becomes your choice. Or, if it's not something that you can genuinely get to a place where you want to do it, then don't do it at all. And let them have whatever feelings they have about that.

Own your holiday experience. Create for yourself that magical feeling of being satisfied, and joy filled and let other people do that for themselves as well.

Alright - till next week working moms when we're going to wrap up this series. But until then, don't forget to join The Collective and be a part of our three-week challenge leading up to Christmas about being present this holiday season. Everything you need in order to be present. You will have me to coach you along the way and other working moms all creating the experience of being present and balanced this holiday season. Join before December 6th in order to participate in the challenge. Until then, let's get to it working moms.

 

 

Rebecca Olson