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Today we are starting a 4-part series focused on the thoughts you have about yourself. Your thoughts play an important role in creating the ambitious and balanced working mom life you want. Your thoughts either make you feel satisfied and successful or they make you feel inadequate and unhappy. Over the next 4 weeks we will cover your thoughts on 4 key areas of life starting, today, with the most intimate area…your marriage. Having a relationship you WANT to be in is an important part of creating a balanced life. Today we will talk about why your thoughts have probably drifted away from your marriage, the types of thoughts that are not useful to you when it comes to having a loving relationship and I’ll share with you a few personal practices that will help you reconnect to your relationship.
Topics in this episode:
How your thoughts impact your life as a working mom
Helpful vs. not helpful thoughts
Why the thoughts you have about your relationship matter
The marriage drift, after kids
Cultivating useful thoughts about your spouse and your marriage
Show Notes & References:
Need a mindset overhaul so that you can feel happy and satisfied in your working mom life? Click here to book a free call where we will talk about exactly how you can achieve the life you want: www.rebeccaolsoncoaching.com/book
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Transcript
Intro
To cultivate a relationship where you feel loved and cared for, where you feel affection toward your spouse, where you're not always focused on what they don't do. If you want this kind of marriage, this kind of relationship, then it requires you to think thoughts that make you feel that way.
Having a relationship you want to be in, where you feel valued and loved. It's an important part in creating life that feels balanced.
Today, we're starting a four part series focused on the thoughts you have about yourself.
Your thoughts play an important role in creating the ambitious and balanced working mom life you want. Your thoughts either make you feel satisfied, loved, valuable, and enough, or they make you feel inadequate, confused, disconnected, and unhappy.
Over the next four weeks, we will cover your thoughts on four key areas of life, starting with the most intimate area your marriage.
Having a relationship you want to be in, where you feel loved and cared for. Where you feel affection towards your spouse. Where you're not always focused on what they don't do. This is an important part of creating a balanced life.
Today, we'll talk about why your thoughts have probably drifted away from your marriage, the types of thoughts that are not useful to you when it comes to having a loving relationship. And I'll share with you a couple of personal practices that will help you reconnect back in to the person you married. You ready? Let's get to it.
Welcome to the Ambitious and Balanced Working Moms Podcast, the place for women who want to balance their ambitious career goals with their life as a mom. If you're looking to feel more confident, decisive, and productive at both work and home, then this is the place for you. I'm your host, Rebecca Olson. Let's get to it.
I cannot believe it's almost August, friends. Oh, my goodness. August marks my birthday. It marks the beginning of a new school year. It marks the end of summer and the changing of seasons. I have all sorts of mixed feelings as August is approaching. Do you feel that way?
Well, I'm excited to launch a new podcast series today. We're going to be talking for four weeks about your thoughts that you have about yourself. Now, I want to do it in four separate podcasts because I want to break it down into categories. I'm going to talk about those categories in just a moment.
Your thoughts play a very important role in how you feel about yourself.
Now, if you're new to this podcast, you might also be new to the idea that your thoughts play a very important role in how you feel about yourself and your life and your work and ultimately, how you respond then to life and the various aspects of life.
Behavioural science teaches us that there is a direct correlation between our thoughts and our emotions and our actions, and particularly, it goes in that order.
The reason why it's so important to understand this is because if you want to create a life that's different than today. In other words, if you want to feel more balanced in your life because you're not feeling that today, or maybe you want to feel more happy and joyful because you don't feel that today. Or maybe you want to change careers because you feel stuck.
If you want something to be different, you want some sort of change in your life, the fuel behind that change is your thoughts.
Because if you change your thoughts, you're going to change the way you feel and then you're going to respond to those feelings differently. Or in other words, you're going to do something different and create something different in your life.
So on this podcast, we talk a lot about our thoughts, or sometimes I like to say it's, the words that pass through your brain. You might also hear me call it a mindset or a perspective.
Now, when it comes to creating a life that feels balanced, where you feel both successful at work and home, the common denominator in that balanced life is you.
You are in every facet of your life. You have the starring role in the story of your life. And so the thoughts that you have about yourself and your life are a key part of what will create that successful and balanced life that you want.
But I find that we have different thoughts about ourselves in different areas of life. And I want to take today's podcast and the next few podcasts to talk about the thoughts that you have about yourself in these various aspects of life.
Now, I will say there's some grey area here, right?
The thoughts that you have about yourself as a mom, they sort of carry over into the thoughts that you have about yourself at work or the thoughts that you have about your marriage sort of carry over into the thoughts that you have about yourself as a mom. You're only one person, of course, and we're just simply talking about all of the thoughts that you have about yourself.
Sometimes it's a lot easier to pinpoint what you're actually thinking, both the helpful and the unhelpful thoughts, by breaking it down into various areas. It can sort of help you hone your thoughts.
Why the thoughts that you have about yourself in each area of life is so important.
So what we're going to do today and over the next four weeks is we're going to be talking about why the thoughts that you have about yourself in each of these areas of life is important. We're going to talk about how it affects your ability to be an ambitious and balanced working mom. And I'm also going to break down for you thoughts that are helpful and thoughts that are not so helpful.
And that's a really important distinction to make. We're not talking about good thoughts and bad thoughts. We're not talking about positive thoughts and negative thoughts. We're not talking about true thoughts or false thoughts.
We're talking about thoughts that are helpful to you, that are useful and thoughts that are not helpful to you or are not useful.
Useful vs not useful thoughts.
And what I mean by talking about thoughts being useful or helpful, what I mean by that is there are some thoughts that you think, there are some words that go through your head that make you feel really good and successful and supported and loved and valuable. Those are helpful, useful thoughts.
And then there are thoughts that make you feel bad and not good and not enough and not valuable and not loved. And those thoughts are probably not very helpful to you or not useful to you.
So I want to give you examples of both types of thoughts as we go through these various areas of life.
So here's how we're going to break it down. We're going to talk about four areas of life:
We're going to talk about your thoughts about yourself as a worker, like at your job.
We're going to talk about the thoughts that you have about yourself as a mom.
We're going to talk about the thoughts that you have about yourself as a partner or in your marriage.
And we're going to talk about the thoughts that you have about yourself and your future.
Four part series. All right, you ready? Can't wait. Here we go.
Today, the thoughts I want to talk about, the facet of life that I really want to focus on is actually not one that I have ever really spoken about before on this podcast, at least not so directly, as I'm going to talk about it today.
I have had a marriage coach on the podcast before. Her name was Maggie Reyes, and I will link to her interview in the show notes because it was so good.
It was about the distribution of household workloads and why we as women tend to take on more of the household duties and what to do about that if we want a more equal distribution of household duties.
So I will link to that because it is an amazing podcast that gives you a little clue as to the topic that we're going to focus on today.
Thoughts about our marriage or partnership.
The facet of life that we're going to focus on today, we’re going to talk about the thoughts that you have about yourself in your marriage or your partnership or your relationship right now, your thoughts about yourself as a partner and your thoughts about your marriage in particular.
Now, before I get started, I want to recognize that my marriage is a heterosexual marriage with one person who identifies as a male and one person that identifies as a female.
But marriages and partnerships obviously can look very widely different and involve different gender identities. The same gender identities, no gender identity.
However you think about yourself in a marriage or a partnership or relationship, whatever word you use, that is all good. I am going to speak today from my own experience in my heterosexual marriage, and I just want you to apply what I am saying to your life and your context.
And if you're not in a marriage or relationship of any kind, I want you to also know that that is okay. Please do not think that being in a relationship is a key to your happiness. You can be a single working mom and love your life.
It all comes down to the thoughts that you have about being single and loving your life, just like it comes down to the thoughts you have about your marriage and your spouse and your life. So take what I'm saying today, apply it to your context.
Now, there is a reason why I picked this area of life first to talk about in the series, and that's because I have been having a lot of thoughts about my particular marriage in these past few days and in the last week, because my husband and I just celebrated our 16th anniversary.
We were married July 21, 2007. We got married in Seattle, Washington, on an unseasonably humid day where it rained several inches and we had no rain contingency planned, even though our ceremony was outside. So we just got to relive this very unforgettable day and celebrate our relationship.
Order of life’s priorities.
Sometimes when I'm talking to clients or potential clients on breakthrough calls, I will ask them to put an order to their priorities. And those priorities are this work, kids, their marriage, themselves, their health, friendships, and community.
Because I work with ambitious women, almost always, they are at the very bottom of the list. But it's also not uncommon for someone to put their relationship or their marriage at the bottom of the list as well. It's sort of a tie either way.
What's clear is that their role as a partner, their marriage, is not a priority, and because of it, the relationship is suffering.
Another question I often ask my potential clients on their breakthrough call is what would happen if nothing changed, if they didn't hire me as a coach right now, if they didn't invest any money or time really into making a change in their priorities, if they themselves or their marriage remain simply at the bottom of the list.
Let me tell you, this is a really difficult question to answer because no one wants to take their brain to this place. No one wants to imagine life staying the same.
When you're spiraling downward or when you feel stuck and stagnant and super unhappy, it doesn't feel good to think about things remaining the same.
If you want something to be different, you are going to have to do something about it.
And yet the reality is for all of us if you want something to be different, if you want to feel happy, if you want to feel balanced, if you don't want to put so much time into your job if you want your family to get the best version of you, if you don't want your health to take a toll, if you don't want to drift further and further apart from your partner, you are going to have to do something about it.
You're going to have to wake up tomorrow and have different thoughts, feelings and behaviors if you actually want to experience something different in your life.
But the reality is, my friends, if your marriage continues to remain at the bottom of the list, it's probably not going to survive. And at some point, you're going to have to decide to move it up the priority list.
At some point, you're going to have to put time and energy and possibly even money into your relationship or relationships, if we're also talking about your family or kids and things like that.
Relationships, marriages that do not stay prioritized do not survive.
Just like you're not going to magically lose weight unless you decide to prioritize your health.
In the same way, you won't magically feel happy and connected to your partner and have a wonderful happy marriage unless you decide to one day put time and effort into it.
Now, I want to circle back to the topic for the day, which is the thoughts that you have about yourself in your marriage, or perhaps the thoughts that you have about your marriage.
Your marriage impacts your ability to have an ambitious and balanced working mom life.
But it's important for you to see the impact that your marriage or your partnership or your relationship, however you define it, it's important to see how that marriage impacts your ability to have an ambitious and balanced working mom life.
Your thoughts about yourself and your relationship and your thoughts about that relationship, they matter and they play a huge part in your ability to be happy in your life.
Even if you were killing it. Even if you were being super successful in your work life, but your marriage was failing probably as a result of it on some level because you were over prioritizing work, it's probably not going to feel very good. You're not going to feel very balanced.
And then similarly, if you couldn't focus on work because so much of your thoughts and your attention were focused on your family and so you weren't as successful in your job as you want to be, or maybe you were underperforming because of it, that's not going to feel very good either. And you're probably not going to create a balanced life out of that as well.
Your thoughts about your marriage and your relationship are a huge part of your ability to create a happy, balanced, and successful working mom life.
Now, I don't think it's intentional that your thoughts drift away from thinking about when you become a mom. Your brain is flooded with thoughts about your kids and about yourself as a mom. It's not that your thoughts about yourself as a wife or a partner go down the toilet. They just seem to be absent.
Remember, your brain can only hold four to six conscious things at any given time. That's not a lot of things to have in the forefront of your mind, right?
And for every mom I know. When they first start having kids, all six of those thoughts are about their kids. And then when you start going back to work, your brain starts to split it up a little bit. Maybe it becomes half and half. Half your thoughts about your job, half of those thoughts are about your kids.
And then for some, they really learn the art of being able to turn on and off their work brain. And so at work, they might even have like, five thoughts to their work and only one thought to their kids.
But the point is, the thoughts about your marriage, they don't seem to be taking up one of those four to six slots in your brain. Those slots are taken up by the demands of work and the demands of being a mom. Your mama brain just simply takes over.
Thoughts about our relationship become absent.
And the thoughts about your marriage or yourself as a partner, they just are absent until they're not. Until you have a fight with your partner, until you haven't been intimate in far too long, until you don't feel cared for or loved, or you feel like you're pulling too much of the weight around the family and they're not doing their part.
Then all of a sudden, your brain starts to generate thoughts about your marriage, about your partner, about yourself in that partnership. And at this point, those thoughts are probably not all that positive.
Not because there's not good things to talk about in the marriage, or that you don't have a love for your partner. It's just that you're out of practice in cultivating those really positive, more helpful thoughts.
The impact of not intentionally cultivating positive thoughts about your marriage can have a huge effect.
Your brain has been hyper focused on taking care of your kids and achieving at work. It just hasn't focused so much on your relationship. But the impact of not intentionally cultivating helpful, more positive thoughts about your marriage can have a huge effect, likely not in the direction you want to go.
My husband and I, after 16 years of marriage, we don't give each other anniversary gifts really. We do honor the occasion, we celebrate. In this case, we had a day away from the kids. We went to a restaurant that we were really always wanting to go to, and it was super quirky and fun, and we just did some things we hadn't done in a long time.
But one thing we do give each other is cards. And something really shifted for me in this anniversary that we just had. As I was writing a letter to my husband, I actually didn't give him a card. I just wrote him a two page letter instead.
Usually the question I sort of ask myself in kind of prompting my writing is, what do I want him to know? And to be honest, I tend to muddle through that. Words don't come out exactly as I really want them to be.
But this time, my brain offered a different question. What do I want to know or remember about my husband. With that question, my brain was flooded with a few different memories. Specifically ones when we were dating.
My husband worked at the Seattle Space Needle. When we were dating, he actually had a couple of jobs. We met working together at a theatre company in Seattle, but that was just one of his jobs. He also worked at the Space Needle, and he pretty much did every job that you could do there, including working and managing the ticket booth.
And when we were dating, I used to come to him at night, like 08:00 at night or 09:00 at night, whenever he had a nighttime shift. And I used to surprise him and stand at the ticket booth and just chat. There wasn't a lot of people that were coming to the Space Needle at night, so it was pretty dead for him.
And sometimes we would run lines because he was an actor, so we would run lines for his current show. And sometimes there was really nothing to talk about or nothing to do, and I would just stare at him through the glass.
And I remember just staring at him with this tenderness and love, and he would just stare back at me and just sigh. And there was just so much affection and love that we had for each other during this sort of dating season of our life.
Recalling memories and feelings.
And as I was remembering these memories, I was reminded today of how I actually tend to still stare at him. He just doesn't know I'm doing it. I stare at him with curiosity as he reads a book.
Right now, he's reading a ton of cookbooks, I kid you not. He has either purchased or checked out at the library, probably close to 100 cookbooks in the last, like, two or three months. He flips through them in a day or two, and then he sends them back to the library.
And I am endlessly fascinated with this. This is never something I would do. Not because I don't like to cook. Actually, up till this point, I have always been the main cook in the family and have always been known for being a great cook. And I love to cook, but his brain works so differently than mine.
And this sort of endless consumption of knowledge about cooking is, like, fascinating to me. And so sometimes I just stare at him as he reads, just curious with what's going on. You could probably feel my affection and connectedness towards my husband right now as I tell you these stories. Because there is there is this tenderness, this fascination that my body feels right now as I retell you this story.
Thinking about memories when we were dating and just thinking about this interesting, very curious season of him reading all of these cookbooks. My thoughts about him are really useful to me right now.
The memories that I'm choosing to think about make me feel really connected and tender and love toward him. And they solicit all of these good feelings, all the things that I want to think about my husband and our marriage.
But to be honest, this part of my husband, this part of him that endlessly consumes a topic and kind of dives all into it, I have not always loved that part of him.
There were times where I thought it was very OCD and strange and even weird. It was almost like he would over consume information to me on a particular subject. And I was so judgmental to this kind of side of his personality, this kind of quirkiness to him.
And notice how all of those thoughts I have, those kind of judgmental, this is weird and quirky and why does he do this? These thoughts, they make me feel very disconnected and judgmental.
They're not very useful thoughts to me when it comes to thinking about this particular part of his personality.
Your thoughts about your marriage, about your history together, about your memories about yourself in that marriage, they either make you feel really good and connected or they make you feel very disconnected and unattracted.
Earlier this year, I had a coach on this podcast. Her name is Danielle Sabry and she's a sex coach. She was in fact, my sex coach. If you want to go back and listen to that podcast, I will put that in the show notes as well.
But I worked with her inside a very intimate program with some other women where we focused on creating really juicy, pleasurable thoughts about ourselves and our intimate life.
I didn't realize this at the time until I joined the program, but my thoughts about myself as an intimate partner were terrible. My husband wouldn't necessarily say any of that, but my thoughts about me in this way were super unsexy, had me completely disconnected from my body and made me feel like not enough in all sorts of ways when it came to the bedroom.
And as you can imagine, this did not help our intimate life. This did not help when it was late at night and the kids have just finally gotten to bed and were exhausted and tired from the day.
In this program, I really had to learn how to shift my thoughts about myself as an intimate partner. And surprise, surprise, when I started to do that, life got a little bit more spicy in the bedroom, right?
These are just a few examples of the various thoughts, either helpful or not so helpful, and how they have affected my marriage and my experience of my marriage.
I have a client right now where we are focusing a lot of attention on her thoughts about her marriage. It's not an uncommon thing to come up in coaching, obviously, because your marriage is a big part of your life as a working mom.
And just like for this client, for many of my clients. When we have this conversation, it's about how their spouse is not doing enough and how they're not pulling most of their weight in the household and how they're feeling very resentful of that.
But almost always in the midst of these conversation, what it really boils down to is the thoughts that they're having about their husband not helping out around the house. It's not really about that so much as it's the thoughts that they then have about themselves for having married someone that does not help out.
Sitting in judgment of yourself is never useful.
These are some of the most unhelpful thoughts that create complete disconnect in your relationship. It becomes almost like a wall between you and your partner. I shouldn't have married him. I made the wrong choice. I should have known better. You sitting in judgment of yourself for marrying the person that you did is never useful to you. Those thoughts will never create more intimate, loving connection in your marriage.
Other thoughts that are not useful to you would be thoughts about yourself like, he shouldn't have married me. I'm not good enough for him. He deserves better. I'm letting him down.
You get to control the way you feel about your relationship.
And then there are, of course, thoughts about the marriage itself. It's not working. Something has to change. We can't go on like this. This is a big problem. You get to control the way you feel about your relationship.
Thoughts like, I love when he… or It's so interesting that he… or I'm so curious about why he… he's the best person for me because… I'm the perfect person for him because… I choose him now because...
And then there are some thoughts like, it's okay that it's hard, or we'll figure this out.
These are the kinds of thoughts that are going to create intimacy, that are going to create connection, that are going to make you feel loved and desirable as a partner.
If you don't take the time to intentionally direct your thoughts to these types of questions, if you don't spend the energy considering your partner's positive impact to the family, your brain is likely going to default to the negative. That's just the way it works.
It will default to how they are doing everything wrong and how you are all alone and how you shouldn't have gotten married in the first place.
I've gone in seasons of writing lists about my husband focusing on all of the good things he brings into my life and into our family's life. I think about the man that I marry today, which is certainly not the man I married 16 years ago. And I think about how much I love him and what I love about him.
I write these things when I'm feeling disconnected from him. I write them when my brain is not defaulting to the positive. And there's, of course, no judgment for that.
Our brain is hardwired to see the not enough.
And sometimes I don't catch it in time and it kind of spirals and life starts to feel more logistic than it does intimate.
But I know that I get to control that. I know that when I redirect my thoughts, no matter how deep I have to dig to find them.
When I redirect my thoughts back to all the good things about him and about our marriage and our life together and our intimacy grows and our connection happens, it's very simple.
The thoughts that you have about yourself, about your relationship, and about you in that relationship, they create feelings that either draw you into the marriage or pull you out.
Those thoughts likely require a lot of intentionality. They require you sitting down, thinking, journaling, or even talking about all of the good and wonderful things about your spouse and your marriage.
Having a happy and connected marriage or relationship, if you're in a relationship, is an important part of creating balance in your life.
In the back of your mind, you can't always be thinking, they're not doing enough. They don't love me enough. I'm letting them down. I should be doing more. We've grown apart. There isn't time for us. These types of thoughts are just simply not useful to you.
To cultivate a relationship where you feel loved and cared for, it requires you to think thoughts that make you feel that way.
I love the person I'm married to.
I love who I'm becoming.
I'm the perfect person for them.
They're the perfect person for me.
They contribute to our family so much.
We're always going to figure this out.
These are the type of thoughts that have you feeling connected and loved.
Choose those thoughts today, my friends. Focus your brain on all of the good in your marriage, in your partner, and in you.
Stay tuned till next week where we will continue this series on the thoughts that you have about yourself and we'll cover a different area of life. Working moms. Have a wonderful week, and until then, let's get to it.
