Welcome to Running to Myself. I’m Trisha Stanton. Life and mindset coach, running coach and host of Running to Myself.
16 years ago I ran my first marathon. The process of training for that first race changed my life. Over the years, my daily runs have become my time to think, heal, pray and work through whatever life is serving up at the moment. All my best ideas happen while I am running. This podcast is my opportunity to share some of the lessons I have learned through the many ups and downs of life during my almost 2 decades of running and learning more about who I am. It is my hope that through my stories maybe you will see a bit of yourself as well and find a nugget of truth and inspiration to take with you. Let’s get started.
If the weeks leading up to Christmas and New Years have been stressful or overwhelming in some way this year or in years past, this is the episode for you. I am going to share 5 practical tools to increase your joy and decrease stress through Christmas and New Years. This is your opportunity to transform your thinking and how you experience the holiday season.
For just a few minutes, allow yourself to shift your focus away from overwhelming to-do lists, endless obligations, looming disappointment and onto one guiding question that will transform your holiday mindset just in time for Christmas.
What do you want to create?
What words describe how you want to feel this holiday season?
Tool #1 for increasing your joy and decreasing your stress is this:
Know exactly what you want to create
The journey to creating a better holiday experience begins with getting to know yourself better and taking ownership of what you create for yourself. If you are a visual person, like me, as you think about what you want to create, you are developing a picture in your mind of how everything will look. You might be thinking about who would be gathered around the table for the Christmas meal. The family games you would play. The gratitude everyone would have for the perfectly chosen and beautifully wrapped gifts. The beautiful Christmas tree twinkling in the background.
This picture of the perfect holiday may come from the holidays you had as a young child. Or maybe the holidays you longed for and WISH you experienced as a child. Maybe this vision of the perfect holiday stems from the beautiful memories you have of when your own children were young and everything seemed so much simpler.
Your brain has such a strong emotional connection to those thoughts, that you probably feel warm, cozy and loved just from visualizing it. Or maybe the nostalgia of what feels so out of reach creates a painful longing in your heart that takes your breath away for a moment. Maybe it seems like you are on the outside, looking at what you wish you had.
Whichever side you find yourself on warm, cozy and loved or painful longing, notice that you have created that from your THOUGHTS.
Listen closely to what I am about to say. You desire your personal version of the picture perfect holiday because of how you THINK it will make you feel.
Our thoughts are the most powerful driving force in our daily lives. They create our feelings and whether we admit it or not, we all act a certain way based on our feelings.
The best news I can tell you about this is that you don’t need the picture perfect Christmas to experience those feelings you long for. You can create those feelings through your THOUGHTS.
Let’s come back to our guiding question… What do I want to create? This time as you think about it, focus on the emotions you want to experience. Specifically, how do you want to FEEL? What if you had to narrow it down to just one feeling? This will help you understand what it is you REALLY want.
As you are thinking about it, I’ll walk you through an experience from my life. This year marks the 9th year in a row that our family will not all be together on the same day to celebrate Christmas. Guess what my picture perfect vision of the best holiday is. It’s having all my family together, laughing, sharing stories, playing games. That exact circumstance has been out of reach for a just shy of a decade now. Does that mean that I feel cheated and let down each year? Not anymore. Trust me, it has taken me plenty of coaching to gain the tools necessary to learn to love the holidays even when they don’t look like that picture I had in my mind. Here’s what I now know: the picture I had in my mind of all us around the table, laughing, playing games, telling stories is my visual of feeling CONNECTION. Your visual may be different. The feeling I most want during the holidays is connection.
Where do our feelings come from? They come from our thoughts. Do I need us to all be together for me to feel connected to my loved ones? No. I create connection with my thoughts about my loved ones. And that is exactly what I have set out to do over the last several years. And boy am I glad I have the tools to do so because not one holiday has gone as planned on the outside, but I am now able to feel the connection I so longed for on the inside.
Listen, if you are a mom of adult kids, you likely already know that things can get tricky around the holidays with schedules and adult lives and jobs and other families mixed in. And I’m just going to say it, our dear ones in their 20s don’t always want to hang out with mom and dad for as long as we want them to, if at all. When you have lots of expectations about how your holiday needs to be, disappointment looms around every corner.
Now, if you are a unicorn in a family of unicorns and your adult kids are still able and willing to show up when you want, for as long as you want and participate exactly in the way you want with no complications, go LIVE YOUR LIFE! And maybe bookmark this episode for when you join the rest of us.
There are some things you get to do when your children are young that you no longer control once they become adults. I do not get to decide when they will come by or how long they stay or if they like spending time with their siblings.
What I DO get to decide is how I am going to show up.
I am going to invite them and love on them while they are here and appreciate that they showed up without layering additional expectations on them and holding my breath to see if I get to enjoy my holiday or not based on their actions and behaviors.
Each year seems to give me an additional opportunity to walk this out in my life.
I’ll share one with you. A few years ago we were all able to be together on Thanksgiving. It was the first time my husband and I, our children and our granddaughter were together under the same roof on Thanksgiving day in six years.
I was beside myself. I was so happy to have us all together.
What is the picture you are getting when you imagine this?
All of us around the table laughing, sharing what we are thankful for, enjoying each other and the meal? Maybe playing games later in the afternoon?
That’s a beautiful picture, and also, that was not our reality.
Here’s how it actually went down….
one kid finished eating and went to lay on the couch before I even sat down,
one tiny child did not like any of the actual food and only ate rolls,
one big kid made snarky comments about another big kid’s parenting,
dogs begged for food.
The actual eating of the meal was over in about 15 minutes
I could have made that mean all sorts of terrible negative things about the day.
I could have declared the holiday ruined.
I could have had thoughts about how I failed as a parent if my adult kids are acting this way
or that my kids are ungrateful and don’t value family
I could have been angry at them for not being more considerate and grateful
The topics for negative stories I could have made up surrounding this situation could fill a book.
Instead I thought about all the previous years how I longed to have us all under one roof for Thanksgiving no matter what it looked like
and I felt so much gratitude that they showed up.
I thought about the obstacles that had kept us apart in the past
and I felt so much gratitude that we were under the same roof for a few hours.
I thought about how much love I have for each of them
and I felt so much gratitude that they showed up.
I created feelings of gratitude from the thoughts I chose to have and that led to me feeling connected to them each in the way I so longed for. I could have chosen different thoughts. There was plenty of evidence to support the more negative thoughts, but why do that to myself?
Why ruin my own day? Life has enough pain in it. I certainly do not want to be in the business of creating additional pain where there doesn’t have to be any.
Instead, I showed up with so much love and gratitude and connection I created ahead of time, that I was free to accept and love everyone else exactly as they showed up that particular day.
My joy was created ahead of time and not dependent on anyone else.
This is Tool #2 Create your own Joy: I wish I had figured this out much earlier in my life. I wasted so many years thinking my joy was dependent on how other people showed up.
Here’s what it looks like to create your own joy.
First, know that it is your THOUGHTS that create your feelings. This is the one thing that will create the biggest and best shift for you.
Now let’s get down to the nitty gritty of the circumstances.
If something (that is within your control) is important to you, make it happen. For example, if you want a holiday arrangement of flowers on the kitchen table, go buy the flowers. Don’t wait for someone else to do it for you and then feel let down when they don’t.
Your joy is not dependent on anyone else. Ever.
No one else is equipped to create your joy-and thinking they are will always end in disappointment.
NExt, and this is a BIG one:
STOP telling yourself that you are doing all the things for everyone else and then being upset when they don’t have the reaction you want them to have.
It’s not completely true. How do we know?
If you were actually doing it for them you wouldn’t need for them to have a certain response about you doing it.
What is really happening is that you think you are going to feel a certain way (appreciated, joyful, happy, worthy) when they validate, praise you, or are grateful for what you have done. So you don’t feel the joy completely or maybe at all in what you are doing while you do it because you think you need to wait for that feedback.
You are creating a situation where your feelings are dependent on waiting for someone else’s reaction. It’s like you are holding your breath and waiting to see how you get to feel about something based on someone else. And what we don’t realize when we do that is that the other person has NO IDEA that at that moment we have our entire self worth wrapped up in their 2 second reaction. They walk into the situation clueless, don’t give the expected big reaction (because they aren’t even aware of the expectation) and then are blindsided and confused when we get mad at them for not appreciating or noticing us. Now we feel terrible and they don’t even know what hit them.
Sound familiar? Am I the only one???
Why wait to create more fun and enjoyment when you can experience it now?
Tool #3 for creating your best holiday is to Constrain your focus to be more present and less overwhelmed
Here’s my biggest secret to creating exactly the holiday I want without feeling overwhelmed: I do just what I need to create and enjoy the Holiday Spirit for myself and not one thing more.
As soon as I notice a feeling of stress or overwhelm coming my way I recognize that I have stepped outside of where I want to be and I stop right where I am. Here’s what that looks like in my life:
Some years all the decorations come out and make their way throughout the entire house. Some years I decide midway through that it is “Christmas enough” and I stop. I do not pressure myself to do it all just because I have those things. The moment I notice that those things are not bringing me joy, I stop spending time on them.
I want you to notice that I have not mentioned my family in this process., Why? It’s not their responsibility to create my joy or reduce my overwhelm.
Once I let go of trying to create what I thought it SHOULD be, I was free to create what I actually wanted and enjoyed.
Decide what is important to you for your holiday this year and let go of the rest.
Tool #4 is related to Tool 3 Just Say NO: Expectations are not Obligations
Some of you want to argue with me about this one, but I promise you, if you adopt this mindset, you’ll thank me for years to come. I have a great story about this and it actually has me on the receiving end of someone else deciding this. When my kids were very young my mom would buy them each cute new pajamas as one of their Christmas gifts. This was way before the family pj trend. As the kids got a little older I guess it wasn’t as much fun for her to pick out pjs, so one year she just didn’t do it.
I was shocked and a little mad “No cute pjs?!” No warning?
Well she did not think it was a big deal at all and basically told me that I could start buying the pjs if I wanted them to have them. I eventually got over it. And now I recognize that my expectation did not obligate her no matter what I thought at the time.
This became the beginning of the tradition of wearing matching pjs on christmas day that we continued for many years.
If you want to say yes to all the things, do it and enjoy it.
If you are thinking of things right now that you dread, maybe it ‘s time to evaluate why you are still doing them. We have all these things in our life that we tell ourselves we HAVE to do and it’s just not true. We choose to do them. So if you are going to choose to do it, you better like your reason. Otherwise, stop doing it.
Will it be uncomfortable to say no? Possibly, at first, but you are already uncomfortable doing those things that you don’t want to do and that leave you overwhelmed and exhausted.
And you are not being truthful by telling yourself you have to do those things.
You are choosing to do them so either choose differently or own the choice and like your reason for making that choice.
If your brain is offering you thoughts right now that sound something like “that’s easier said than done”, or “maybe you can do that, but I certainly can’t”, “you don’t know my situation”....etc, I would like to offer you a new thought--what if it is that simple?
Tool #5 has the potential to change your family dynamic in the most powerful way. Commit to accepting your people as they are and give them the space to create what they want from the holiday as well.
If you really commit to this process, By the time you get to tool #5 You have already done the thought work necessary to create what you want. Imagine the freedom you will feel when you are able to show up ready to enjoy every person and every moment of the day. Would you feel lighter? Would you feel more abundant? Would you have more fun? Would you feel less pain?
You don’t need for them to act or be a certain way for you to have a perfect holiday season, because you are going to do the work to create that for yourself. This enables you to love them and enjoy them no matter how they show up. Adopting this mindset frees you up to have so much gratitude for your loved ones. The expectations that you have held so tightly to for such a long time? They are causing you pain. They are blocking your joy. And they are outside of your realm of control. Decide to accept your loved ones as they are right now. Your brain might be giving some push back “oh you don’t know MY family” and while that’s true I would also like to offer that Resistance to letting go of expectations that we have of others is evidence that you still feel like you need to control them for you to be happy, satisfied, content, whatever the feeling is that you think is dependent on them..
Let’s review our 5 tools for decreasing stress and increasing joy this week
#1 Know what you want to create (what do you want to feel?)
#2 Create your own Joy
#3 Constrain your focus to be more present
#4 Just Say NO: Expectations are not Obligations
#5 Commit to accepting your people as they are
Thank you so much for joining me today. I hope you will find these tools helpful as you go create a week you will love. I hope you will join me in deciding to have a Merry Christmas no matter what.
That’s all I have for you today, my friends. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Running to Myself. You can find previous episodes on apple podcasts and spotify or on my website www.trishastanton.com. New episodes are released each Monday. You can subscribe on Apple or Spotify to automatically receive each new episode as it comes out.
If you know someone who you think would enjoy this podcast, please share it with them! I will be back next week to share a little more about my journey on the road to discovering my truest self.
In the meantime, if you want to know more about my coaching program or have questions about one-on-one coaching or life coaching in general, please visit my website at www.trishastanton.com or my Facebook Group The Simple Truth Coaching. I would love to hear from you!
Have a great week and remember, Mindset Matters!
