Eps 219: Being a Shameless Mom with Sara Dean

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Sara Dean 5:00
To realize that I had built a business that wasn't really in alignment with my core values anymore. So I didn't want to be a gym owner helping women lose weight after I became a mom, because I felt like that really disempowered women to have weight loss be a primary goal for their entire lives, as it is for many women, and I wanted to be talking more about motherhood and the implications of motherhood that people don't talk about. So I started my podcast, the shameless mom Academy, and decided to sell my gym, and now here we are. So I sold the gym, built a business around the podcast, and now I'm full time in the podcast, in the shameless mom Academy, and it's been really, really amazing,

Casey O'Roarty 5:38
well, and I just think it's so interesting how we have this vision of what motherhood will mean, of what it's going to be like, like even nursing, you know, I mean, I was this, I'm a super, I was like a super, power, breastfeed mama and with my daughter, you know, first it was like a solid five days of only colostrum. So the girl was starving, just like you're saying, like she was starving. We went to the pediatrician. Pediatrician was like, well, here, take home this six pack of formula. And I was like, No. And my husband was like, Babe, she's really hungry. And I was like, I'm not touching the formula. And so Ben would like, wake up in the middle of the night and he would give her an entire bottle, and she would guzzle that stuff down, right? And I was like, What am I doing? Nipple confusion, like I was so beheld, bent on it looking a certain way. And then, of course, my milk, well, not of course, but for me, my milk did come in and with a vengeance, and I had plenty, and her latch was fine. There was no nipple confusion, there was no like, but that fear that I had at the very beginning, like, No, we can't do that, because then we won't. It won't be the way I thought it would be. And then yeah, and like not wanting to I, for me, I didn't want to leave the house for a long time. And, I mean, it was and now having teenagers, I'm like, holy shit. I don't know if I would have been on board.

Sara Dean 7:13
You know, it's never gotten memo. If you gotten the teenager memo,

Casey O'Roarty 7:17
oh my gosh, everyone, sorry. Spoiler alert, it's really hard. But, you know, we don't realize that we have narratives that we're holding on to until the narrative that we're holding on to is not what is playing out in front of us. Right, right,

Sara Dean 7:34
right. Yeah, I went through a lot of similar things with my ideas around nursing and basically, like, my son was falling off the growth chart and pretty much borderline failure to thrive. And we had to go, and I was like, well, let's get a second opinion. Like, let's just make sure he's really almost failure to thrive. Consider formula. We went to get a second opinion, and the doctor was like, I need you to know that this baby needs food right now.

Casey O'Roarty 8:00
This isn't an opinion. This is a Yeah, and now he's thriving. How old is your son? So

Sara Dean 8:07
he's seven now, yes, so seven years old, he's no longer hungry,

Casey O'Roarty 8:11
so good. He eats food, right? Got him off the formula. Yeah,

you are a coach too, right? So you've become a coach in this whole process. Tell me a little bit about So you started the podcast, and, you know, wanted to have these conversations. Tell me about where, like, how did you get into coaching? Yeah,

Sara Dean 8:31
so I so had been in the fitness industry for many years. Prior to being in the fitness industry, I worked with kids in a psychiatric hospital. So I have this background. My education is in sociology and psychology. And then I worked in the fitness industry with women for 15 years. So when I got to the tail end of my fitness journey, I I was really aware that I wanted to be coaching women, but in a different way, like having different conversations. And I one of the things that was so glaring to me was women would come in. I mostly had moms as members in my gym, and they would come in and they would talk about, like, Well, I really want to work on, like, losing my belly fat and like, this jiggle over here, and these dimples here, and the cellulite and all these things. And they talked about their bodies in such sad ways, and their the way that they saw their bodies were it was like they were tortured by the skin that they were in. And I realized over time that I wanted to be having conversations about around helping women take up space, rather than always trying to shrink in the space they existed in. And I saw this happening in so many different ways. So I saw it happening in my gym in terms of women being really self conscious about specific body parts. But I also saw it happening in the way that women enter conversations, the way that women do or don't speak up in the workplace, the way that when you know, if someone holds the door open for a woman instead of walking through and saying thank you, she'll say, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. And like, hustle through and just try to be like as small. All as possible, because someone was kind to hold open a door. And so I started recognizing that I wanted to be having these conversations and really supporting women as they learn to take up space and find their power and use their voice and all these different things. And so I took that background of having worked in Psych, sociology, health and wellness for all those years, and started just working on transformation and accountability coaching, which has evolved into business coaching, and, you know, coaching on a few different levels now, and I do a lot of so I do mindset coaching in my membership community, and then I do leadership and business coaching in my mastermind community. And so it's allowed me to find different ways to support women as they want to set goals that are outside of just changing their physical body, and if they want to change their physical body on top of that, like, Fine, that's great, but that's not I'm never going to lead a woman's journey with a weight loss goal. I'm not going to ever support that. And for so many women, that is the opposite of their entire existence. And so that's been really cool to be like, we're not going to start this conversation with you setting a weight loss

Casey O'Roarty 11:06
goal. Yeah, well, and it's interesting too, because I think it's similar to parent coaching. You know, parents come and they're like, here's all the things that are wrong with my child. I need coaching. And, you know, similar with, like, well, here's all the weight, here's the potty parts. I don't like coach me to get rid of this when, like, it's such an inside job. You know, it's not about the body, it's not about the weight loss, it's not about the kid, it's not about the sibling fighting. It's really about how are we showing up in our relationship, whether it's our relationship with ourself, our relationship with our kids, you know, our relationship with the world. I just, I love that conversation. It's so fascinating to me, and it's so powerful. Because if results are measured by, you know, these external things, then it feels it's pretty disempowering. But yes, yeah, when, yeah, when we can recognize that how we feel. You know our confidence. You know how going, you know for parent coaching, like going to bed at night and knowing that you showed up well versus, I mean, granted, it's really nice when our kids aren't a pain in the ass, but when they are and we can show up in a way that maintains relationship and makes us feel good about ourselves. You know, that's the biggest win, right,

Sara Dean 12:32
right? Yeah, and it's really interesting that. So I just, in the last year, added in this new program, my new mastermind program called tenacious mamas, and it's my leadership mastermind. And when women first got started in it there like they got let in on the secret. So we had a couple of calls, and we were talking about conversations around like, you know, being the CEO of your life, and what does that mean? And so some of these women own their own businesses. Some of them are working on moving up in leadership roles, in corporate jobs, and we got into, you know, our third or so call, and people, all of them, were like, hold on a minute.

So is basically all of this about mindset? Like they're like, is there not a formula where you can just be like, do these three steps, and then you can own a seven figure business or be a CEO, or what I was like, yeah, no, it's all it's all mindset. So I don't really care. Like your goal could be to parent your teenager or lose 30 pounds or become the CEO, but the foundation of what you need is all around mindset and belief that you can do it that you are qualified, that you are worthy, and especially moms, do not feel qualified and worthy. We often feel like we have gaps in our resume, whether it's our professional resume, our personal resume, like whatever your resume means to you. Instead of looking at all the ways we are actually more qualified than the average person, we look at ways that we are less qualified, where we deem ourselves to be less qualified. And so, yeah, it's, it's all mindset for all the things. And so, I mean, whether it's parenting, health, wellness, leadership, all of it, it's, it's really about mindset. And so that's been it was funny when my group brought this up, I was like, yeah, so that's the million dollar secret. Got it. Like, I can tell you three steps to go build a successful business, but if you don't have the mindset to back it up, it's not going to work. Just like I can tell you three steps to lose 30 pounds, but if you don't have the mindset to back it up, it's not going to work,

Casey O'Roarty 14:30
yeah, yeah. About three weeks into positive discipline classes, the parents say, Oh, this is about me, yeah,

Sara Dean 14:37
yeah, yeah,

Casey O'Roarty 14:39
spoiler. I don't put that on the flyers, because

Sara Dean 14:41
no one would go right. Totally, totally. As I was

Casey O'Roarty 14:46
researching and prepping for this interview, I was on your website, and you had shared that you have some pillars that you coach women around when you work with them in the varying degrees that you do. And I would just love to spend. Our time kind of teasing apart these pillars. You cool with that? Yeah? Totally. Okay, good. So number one on your list is that perfect sucks, which is lovely to have a depression to say that, because it's also unattainable.

Sara Dean 15:18
Yeah, yeah, talk about that. Yeah? So perfect sucks, and perfect is paralyzing. And I work with a lot of women, a lot of moms, who would identify as being high achiever type, a control freak kind of women. I also would put myself in that category. And so what happens when you are that awesome kind of person is that you can get really stuck in procrastination and perfectionism. And so procrastination is a form of perfectionism. You put off making choices and doing things because you are afraid of being imperfect or not making the right decision or the best decision, and all of that can be really, really crippling and keep us really stuck. And so I would say this is where I was in those few years between my son being like, zero and three, where I was like, Okay, this business I built is not feeling right anymore, but I also don't know what to do next, and I'm terrified, like, there's a thing called a podcast. I could start one. But what do I even do with that, and what makes me qualified? And so what I had to do was give myself permission to just go try and to have no expectations around it, and to let it be like just a fun little hobby that I was going to practice. And so I really push women to take imperfect action every single day. Because if you take imperfect action, and only, you know, get 40% toward a goal, and you do that over and over and over, you're still gonna have this massive upward trend toward growth and progress. If you are always aiming for 100% you will go nowhere. Because first of all, you're not gonna ever launch, build, grow the thing. And second of all, when you do it's you will have used up so much time and energy that you won't have the step for the next thing. And so when you get stuck in that perfectionism, your action steps and your growth is very stunted, and your growth spurts are minimal. There's not very many of them, because you always are waiting for things to be perfect before you go to the next thing. If you give yourself permission to take imperfect action all the time, you're always growing, even if you completely mess up and miss the mark and fall flat on your face, you still learn from that, and you get to keep going, and the trend will still be an upward trend, and so, and there's momentum with that, and the momentum piece is really important. If you're imperfectionism, there's no momentum. So it all feels really hard and really slow and like, like you're stuck in molasses with every step.

Casey O'Roarty 17:44
I love that. Can I put it in the context of parenting? Yeah, yeah. Because what I see also is a lot of people who get really excited about positive discipline, positive parenting, gentle parenting, whatever label you want to put on it, right? The style of parenting that isn't what we were raised with, basically, and it makes sense, and it feels good to read the blogs and listen to the people talk about it, and then real life happens, and we're confronted by our kids, and because it's not a familiar it might not be a familiar way of being, we slide into what we know, which can sound harsh, or, you know, overly firm, and then we feel and this is where my perfectionist clients get really hung up, because then they feel like a failure, like, I cannot stand the phrase mom fail. I don't think there's, you know, I think that it's so disempowering. And because even when and like what you're talking about, those small steps, and even when you try and it doesn't work out, it's still momentum. Because, and this is what I say to the people that I work with, showing up, you know, in a way that you later feel like I could have handled that better, the fact that you realize you could have handled it better is a step forward, totally, right? And then getting caught up in, I can't do this. This isn't for me. I'm a failure. I'm a bad mom. Like, that's where perfectionist has clouded the vision, right? And made it so there's this unattainable like, oh, you read the blog, and now you should be able to handle every situation that comes up with ease and grace and love. And guess what? We are freaking humans, and our people are humans, and they throw all sorts of stuff at us, and we have conditioning. And there's just, you know, give yourself a break. Yourself a break totally.

Sara Dean 19:43
Are you familiar with Brooke Castillo? I know the name, yes. So Brooke Castillo coaches, trains, life coaches, and she has a podcast called The Life Coach School. She's brilliant, but she talks about doing b minus work. And I love this. And for someone who like, I'm a per. Person who, like, if I ever got an 80% on a test, I mean, you may as well give me a zero, like, I just b minus work is like, not I was the person who was always begging for extra credit in school. So b minus work is not something that is, like, super comfortable for me. And also, I can tell you that if I hadn't gotten comfortable with B minus work at a certain point in my life, I wouldn't have been able to make a living building either of I built now three businesses, and I wouldn't have been able to make money. And this became glaring my first blog that I had, and I remember spending hours and hours and hours and sending posts to my mom to be like, Hey, can you edit this for typos, after having edited it like five times myself, and then thinking, how am I supposed to do this three times a week? How am I supposed to get up three posts a week if I'm so worried that I might have used the wrong version of there, there or there, you

Casey O'Roarty 20:46
know? Well, you don't want to do that. Sarah,

Sara Dean 20:50
and so I had to really get anything like that Right, right. And then my mom, who's also a perfectionist, she'd be like, well, you need to look up the use of a comma in this sentence. I mean, between the two of us, like it was awful. And so one of the things that I actually put conscientious thought to when I was getting ready to launch a podcast, I was like, so should I go back and build a blog, like a blog around motherhood or a podcast? And I immediately was like, I can't do the blog, because I know myself well enough to know that I will get crippled in the details, and I don't have time for that BS, so I have to do the podcast because I can hit record. I don't care if I fumble, I can make a joke about it, and I can move on with my day. And so I knew for me, doing b minus work was doing a podcast instead of a blog, because I could comfortably show up more imperfectly there and there, and then I could produce more and have more fun with it, and like all these other things. So I love that concept for anyone who wants to steal it, it's not mine, but I encourage moms especially to really push themselves to do B minus work on a conscientious level. Yeah, and it's

Casey O'Roarty 21:51
just side note, it's okay for your kids to do B minus work too. Yeah. Okay, so that's my PSA, okay, so what about I'm going to move on to the second pillar that you talk about, which is routine is everything. And of course, as a parent coach, I talk a lot about routine, as far as you know, systems and ways of keeping everything moving in the home. How do you what's the context that you use routine when you work with clients? So

Sara Dean 22:18
there's a couple pieces to this, I use routine for myself because I manage anxiety sometimes on a very high level every single day. And so for me, routine makes me feel at ease and sane and like I can be the control freak that I need to be. And so that's how it's shown up for me. But and I work with a lot of clients who are similar and appreciate that. And then I also work with clients who are like, I'm not really a structure person. And to that, I say you're doing yourself and your family, your kids, a disservice. Because, and I'm sure you talk about this all the time in parenting, kids thrive on structure and predictability. And so even if you're not, quote, unquote, a structure person, you need to push yourself to build some of that in. And there comes a piece with that. There also becomes a new level of efficiency and effectiveness with routines. And I think that there is a momentum that comes with routine and a that creates space for growth that's really, really important. And so I think that if you're someone who kind of prides yourself on not being a structure person, I would encourage you to look at the gifts structure could bring. Because I know I have people, I have moms who I've worked with who have brought structure in in different ways, and they're like, oh, this actually is giving me a huge sense of relief. This is actually creating mental freedom for me. And so yes, if you can create mental freedom in motherhood, I mean, when you wear 18 million hats in a day, mental freedom is everything, and that's what structure and routine brings to you. Yes,

Casey O'Roarty 23:54
I love that absolutely, 100% freedom within structure. And so funny those you know, I love you all. All you spontaneous. I just fly by the seat of my pants. People like, Okay, you do? You what might happen with a little bit of structure?

Sara Dean 24:11
I'm like, I can get up even earlier, like, I get up at 530 now, but I'm like, if I thought 430 then I would have even more time to plan my day. I've been trying

Casey O'Roarty 24:21
to get up at seven and coming up over the break and my teenager sleeping in. I'm like, Uh

Sara Dean 24:27
oh, gosh. I don't enjoy the getting out of bed part, but to have a big chunk of time in the morning by myself is like, Oh yeah,

Casey O'Roarty 24:35
it's so dreamy. Yeah, I'm gonna get there. I'm gonna get there. All right, it's okay to cry. Talk to me about this killer often, actually, yes.

Sara Dean 24:44
So I think, and I mean, you could use cry literally or figuratively. I think that we try to keep things buttoned up for a real long time as women and moms, I'm a, I can't so I'm a very emotional person. In and I'm married to someone who is not. I was actually just talking about this last night on a group coaching call. I was saying, how, you know my emotions like, I feel everything very extremely. So I cry easily when I'm happy, sad, anything in between. I feel if I'm frustrated, I'm like, very frustrated. If I'm excited or joyful, I'm very excited and joyful my husband. So I don't live in the middle. I don't live in this middle place of, like, everything's fine. I'm just never there. I'm always, like, at an extreme. My

Casey O'Roarty 25:28
so the same. We're so the same. Sarah, it's so funny. I love it.

Sara Dean 25:32
My husband lives right in the middle. He's like, it's good, it's fine. Like, I mean, I remember we were about to go on a really big trip, and I was so excited. And I was like, Oh my gosh, can you, can you believe we're doing this? Like, this has been, you know, we've been planning this for a year, and he's like, he's like, no, yeah. Like, I mean, it's gonna be great. I was like, climbing out of my skin. I was so excited. He was just like, cool, yeah. I was like, right. So I'm always in awe of his ability to just be like, cool, fine, whatever. But so what I think, when I think about it's okay to cry, I think that we need to give ourselves permission to feel in big ways and to be vulnerable with those feelings. And that doesn't mean that you sit in the workplace and cry all the time, but it means that you can show up with vulnerability, and you can show up with emotion, and you can share that with other people. And so sometimes that might be going to a family member or close friend and being like, Hey, I'm really having a hard time. Sometimes it might be going to your boss and standing up for yourself, or standing up for something that you see in the workplace and being like, this is not okay. This is not cool. This is not going to fly or, you know, for these different reasons. So I think that, you know, when I think of it's okay to cry, I think it can mean all of those things. I also think that it can just be okay in private. I mean, not that it only needs to be in private moments, but it can be okay to have moments to yourself in a day where you're just like, Mama needs to take a minute. And I've had moments I had, I remember about a year ago, I had this Monday that was just like relentless, a bunch of things went wrong. I know it was more than a year ago, since when I still had the gym, but I had the podcast. I was kind of burning the candle at both ends, managing both of the businesses, and on a Monday, I had like, three trainers call in sick for the next day. And then, like, something went wrong with the podcast. My husband was getting picking up Vinnie from school, and so I needed to get dinner ready. And I remember standing in the middle of my kitchen being like, everything is falling apart at one time, and like, what? WTF? Like, there. What is there? Is this the universe trying to teach me something, what's happening? And so I had to find band aids for all of these solutions in a really quick amount of time, and then get dinner on the table. And I remember being in the middle of my kitchen feeling so angry and defeated and resentful that like, this is my life right now, and thinking like you have to find a lesson in this, or you can't move on from it, like you will just it will ruin your day. You won't sleep well. And so I gave myself, like, an hour. I was like, you are going to be super pissed for an hour while you make dinner, and you're going to be annoyed with your trainers, and you're going to be annoyed with the podcast, like all the things, and then you're going to find a lesson. And by the end of that hour, I was like, Okay, now I get it. And this was when one part of the sale of the gym had kind of gone awry. And I was at this point where I was like, I could choose to pull the sale right now and wait for a better offer, because this offer is kind of blowing up on me. And I thought, No, this is the universe telling me you need to be done with this now that you are spending your family time trying to find subs for trainers tomorrow. This is the universe screaming that you need to sell this as fast as possible, because you can't feel like this the next time you make dinner on a Monday night. And so that was the gift for that. Like I had to let myself sit in the kitchen and cry, be super frustrated, and then be like, Okay. And now what's the lesson? Here's what it is, and now I'm gonna move on. And so I think that when we give ourselves that time to cry in literal or figurative ways, that there's tremendous value that comes out of it, and that we learn to listen to ourselves, and that's really important, because I think that's a whole nother thing that women and moms don't do, is we don't listen to ourselves, we don't pay attention to our intuition. Because we've had to prioritize our kids in many ways since, you know, the minute they were having nipple confusion at five days old.

Casey O'Roarty 29:16
Or maybe they weren't. We were just totally freaked out. Right, right, exactly, well. And I think that what I'm hearing you talk about too here is to feel like, to feel your feelings, and to validate like, validate feeling the way that you feel, and you know, and regardless. And I just want to like, connect with the listeners out there like you don't need to be navigating to businesses and you know, things, it can show up in so many different ways, right? I know for me, anyone that's listened through the fall knows that I've had a really challenging season of parenting with one of my teens and just allowing myself to sit with a. Uncertainty, being with discomfort. I had somebody who text me. One of my former clients texted me this morning, and she was like, I just want to point out that you've become a master of sitting in discomfort. And you know, my initial thought is like, don't call me a master of anything. And then I thought to myself, like, I'm getting pretty masterful at being with discomfort, and I think the more that we can allow space for that without, you know, diving into the black hole of like, wallow poor me victimhood, right? Because what I heard you say is, I allowed myself to be with what was coming up for me, and the allowance, I think when we allow ourselves to feel what we're feeling, creates a little bit of space so that we can start to recognize the lessons. And maybe it's not after an hour, maybe it's a couple days later, or maybe it's, you know, I'm guessing that the lessons of last fall will show up at some point for me, but I have faith that there's a bigger picture happening for my, one of my kids, that will be revealed when it's meant to be revealed, and I get to be in loving relationship with her and as supportive as possible. And you know, just make sure that her physical and mental health are being taken care of, but yeah. And you know what? Everyone, if you don't have a person to talk about these things with, get a therapist, please.

Sara Dean 31:28
Oh my God. Everyone, yes, yes. And know that these things are qualifying you for the next thing, yes. And in the moment that might not give you a lot of peace of mind, you might be like, I don't need to be more things that are harder, but there will be something that happens in 10 years. You'll be like, I'm so glad I went through that, because now I'm more qualified for this absolutely.

Casey O'Roarty 31:50
And I think, well, even for me, like one of the like, one of the lessons that is appearing is, you know, I can work with parents of teenagers who come to me with challenges, and I can say to them, I get it from a place of actual experience and not just protecting. I imagine to know what it must feel like for you, but really like, No,

Sara Dean 32:17
I know that's a huge gift. I'm not saying that like you wanted that to happen.

Casey O'Roarty 32:24
That might not be coming now that I wanted that to happen, but

Sara Dean 32:27
now that you have your PhD in parenting teens. I mean,

Casey O'Roarty 32:32
teens gone rogue. 101, sign up. Results may vary. So, Okay, moving on, moving on, because I'm looking at the time, of course. So listeners, I was on Sarah's podcast too. She interviewed me, and we had the same situation where we could just talk for a million hours. But oh so good. Okay, gratitude and attitude. I'm excited for this one makes all the difference. Talk about that.

Sara Dean 32:58
Yes. So I am someone who has kind of found it, like, super cheesy when people are like, you know, get out your gratitude journal, practice your affirmations and your visualizations. But I also have put some of those things to the test and found that they do actually work, even though I didn't really want them to. So I don't,

Casey O'Roarty 33:19
I love it.

Sara Dean 33:22
Yes. Are you familiar with the Miracle Morning? By or by Elrod? So I read his book, for those of not familiar. It's a morning practice book that involves six different things, six different routines that you do every morning that take an hour and and I read the book, and the book is super compelling. A lot of routines, I'm not gonna lie, yes. And the book is really compelling. So as you're reading it, you're like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna totally do this. Like, I'm gonna get up every morning and I'm gonna meditate for 10 minutes and visualize for 10 minutes. And what were the other exercise for 10 minutes? Read for 10 minutes, journal for like, all the things. Okay, so I did a few months of this, and I was like, This is so many things. And the things that really got me were the visualization and the affirmations. I was like, I feel like a nut. Like, this doesn't feel good. The affirmations that he recommended felt so cheesy. And then he was like, You need to read them out loud. So I'm like, sitting in my basement, like, please do not let my husband get up and hear me saying this out loud. This is so cheesy. So I abandoned some of that practice. I actually continue to integrate some of it, the parts that felt good, but the the parts that felt really hard. I treated a little bit like yoga. So for those of you who've done yoga, they always say, you know, the poses that feel the worst are the ones you need the most, which always makes me want to punch someone. So I've kind of treated the Miracle Morning process like that. I don't do the whole hour long process like HAL recommends, but I've looked at like, Okay, if these affirmations are the things that make me the most uncomfortable, I probably need to look at them from a different angle and try to work through them. So I've gone back to integrating affirmations and gratitude and these kinds of things on a routine basis, and it has made a really big difference. So when it comes. Comes to gratitude. Specifically, I think that the value of that is how it can allow you to be nimble in your mind. And I think there's this is just such an important and significant life skill, and I use it all the time in motherhood, and I also see having a partner who is as quite as woowoo as me, and doesn't really embrace a gratitude

Casey O'Roarty 35:23
practice. He's not as nimble of mine. Sometimes I'm like, maybe you

Sara Dean 35:27
could be a little more nimble in your mind. So there's times when we will feel like, you know, a million things are going wrong on a day of parenting, and I can still be like, Well, I'm so glad we get to cuddle on the couch or whatever. And he'll be like, what is the point of it all, you know? Like, I mean, that's what his actual emotions do come out. He's like, this isn't how I expected this day to go, and now it's all ruined and, and I'm like, let's, you know, just take it for what it is, and we're gonna instead of, instead of going and doing this fun thing that we thought we were gonna do, because the day has fallen apart on us with this child who's in the middle of a meltdown, we're gonna now stay at home and put on our pajamas and go to bed early, and that's gonna feel good for everyone. So this nimbleness around being able to find gratitude in hard moments and hard phases of life, I think, really, really pulls you through when times get trying. And I've seen myself be able to really embrace that, and again, as someone who manages anxiety, it also really helps me end cap my day to be able to, you know, I used to lay down in bed at night and immediately start thinking about, like, oh crap, I have all these things due to tomorrow. And now I lay down and I just exhale with like, I'm so glad that this happened and this happened and this happened. And it's this automatic impulse that I have now to start running through my list of, oh, that time that Vinnie laughed this morning, and when he read his first, you know, chapter out of this book, and when I had that great conversation for the podcast, and like all these things and that now is my like a reflex to me. And now I can go to sleep at night, whereas I, for years of my life, spent hours trying to go to sleep and manage anxiety and overcome anxiety and sleepiness and sleeplessness. And so it has worked really well for me. And it's also become something that is very much an impulse versus a like, now I have to think of something to be grateful for, and it doesn't feel hard. It feels again. There's a nimbleness to it, of like, oh yeah, this is what we do right now.

Casey O'Roarty 37:18
Okay, so prior to the nimbleness and prior to it being a reflex, what can you just share with the listeners? What were some of your first baby steps towards that end cap of gratitude at bedtime? Um,

Sara Dean 37:32
so it was really catching myself in tiny moments of joy and so and it was, and I conscientiously started looking at this in terms of, like, different senses, and so rather than looking at a gratitude practice around, like, I'm so grateful for to have a roof over my head and have good health, which obviously grateful for those things, rather than looking at those big things, looking at really tiny things, like, Oh my God. I mean, we're in Seattle, where the sun doesn't shine very often, especially this time of year and on a sunny moment, in a sunny moment, to be able to walk outside and feel like, oh my gosh, I just felt that sun hit my arm. That felt so good lighting a candle, and that first whiff of ascent like, oh my gosh, I love that. Or this time of year, when the shower, when the hot water hits me in the shower, so like little sensory experiences, putting up. I did not frame a child a photo of my child for like, four years, and I put photos up of him in my office. You were

Casey O'Roarty 38:26
in denial that he was high. So I

Sara Dean 38:30
finally put photos up, and I was like, Oh my gosh. This is bringing me so much joy to turn my head to the left of my desk and see six cute little pictures of him in frames. I mean, this brought me literally, like, a full year of joy, and so catching those moments where I was like, Oh, that felt really good. So that's really where it started for me, was catching those tiny little moments and then getting better at remembering them later in the day. But it really started with catching things as they happen, or making things happen, recognizing like I'm feeling like, I'm really grinding at the computer right now, so I'm going to step outside into this. I actually made a rule for myself two or three summers ago, if it's sunny out, you will go for at least a 10 minute walk in the sun, because then I got to, like scheduling. This is something that feels really good, and I'm gonna go get 10 minutes of sun on my body. So I started creating experiences also to be conscientiously. I called them joy hits. But to get those Joy hits like I'm conscientiously going to light this candle so that I can get that first whiff, or go on the walk and get that done,

Casey O'Roarty 39:30
all right? And the final one, which I think we kind of covered with the it's okay to cry, but suffering in silence is the most surefire way to destroy yourself. Those are some aggressive words, Sarah,

Sara Dean 39:43
I told you, I live in extremes. So I think that we moms, women and moms, we do suffer in silence, and we think that we we think we're not relatable. We think that our stories are only our own. And. And there's an exercise I do so I have an event called shameless mom con. And there's this exercise that I do that really shows like, how many women have been impacted by abuse, by rape, by addiction, by infertility, by eating disorders, all these different things. And there's all these things in our minds that we think make us not good enough, not relatable, not worthy. And we constantly use those as a frame of reference when we go to make choices in our lives, whether it's going for a promotion or, you know, asking a mom to go to get a drink or coffee with you to, like, make a new mom friend, we run through this crazy filter of like, oh, well, I don't know. You know, I went through that bad situation 20 years ago, so the mom might not want to be my friend, and when I say that out loud, that sounds pretty ridiculous, but we have these subconscious thoughts, and so I think that we need to be really conscientious, that the things that we think need to isolate us, or that we think we need to like, keep behind lock and key, because people will think we're not relatable, are actually exactly the things that we need to be sharing with other people, exactly the things that do make us relatable. Because even if I haven't had the same trauma as you, the fact that you have had trauma and you've opened yourself up to sharing it with me will allow me to then share my trauma. And we've all had trauma on different different ways and levels, and so I think that's what allows us to connect with our partners, with our friends, it allows us to build new relationships that we would have never otherwise built, and I think that that is can be life giving and life saving for some moms.

Casey O'Roarty 41:31
Yes, I love that. I'm really feeling pulled to ask about shameless mom con, but I'm not going to do it right now, not to do that offline, because we don't have very much time. And I want to ask you my final question, which is in the context of being a shameless Mom, what does joyful courage mean to you? Sarah,

Sara Dean 41:50
so for me, joyful courage means finding joy in being uncomfortable. So I think about courage around like embracing discomfort and intentionally doing uncomfortable things that for me is how I frame courage for myself. Last year, I made myself take up skiing even though I'm terrified of heights and chair lifts and speed, and I think that chair lifts are like death traps. But I made myself take up skiing because we wanted my son to ski, and so I learned how to ski, and it took a ton of courage. Pretty much, didn't want to do it at all ever, every time I went up to the mountain. But I also got up there every week and was like, Oh my gosh, look how beautiful it is up here. There was so many rewards from it. And I also had not pushed my body, as someone who's been in fitness for many years, I hadn't pushed my body in a new physical endeavor in a really long time, and I forgot how rewarding that was to find strength in something physical, something new that was physical. And so there was just all of these rewards that came out of it that I did not expect that had nothing to do with, like actually skiing down the mountain that became kind of like, Oh, cool. And I also get to ski down the mountain on top of all these other things. So yeah, so I would say finding the rewards in discomfort and then seeking that, and then moving forward seeking more discomfort, which I'm like, constantly seeking discomfort. Well,

Casey O'Roarty 43:15
apparently I'm the master of discomfort. So go podcast about that. Where can listeners find you and follow your work? So

Sara Dean 43:23
you can find me any podcast, any place you listen to podcasts. You can just look up the shameless mom Academy, and then you can go to shameless mom.com to find more about what we're doing. We have shameless mom con coming up at the end of March in Seattle, which is going to be super amazing, which is a three day conference for moms and yeah, and we have a Facebook group, so there's like 2800 moms from all over the world, if you go to shameless mom.com/facebook and there's a private Facebook group for shameless moms, which is also a really powerful place to connect with mamas.

Casey O'Roarty 43:54
Awesome. Yay. Thank you so much for coming on and talking to me. Sarah, it was so great. Thank

Sara Dean 43:59
you. Thank you. Casey,

Casey O'Roarty 44:04
joyful courage community, you are amazing. Big thanks and love to my team, including producer Chris Mann at pod shaper. Please be sure to join in the discussion over at the live and love with joyful courage Facebook group as well as the joyful courage business page on Facebook and Instagram. Subscribe to the show through Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google Play. I Heart Radio or really, anywhere you find your favorite podcasts, you can view the current joyful courage programs and my coaching offers over at the web page. Simply head to www dot joyful courage.com to find more support for your conscious parenting journey. If you want to give back to the show, and I really hope you do become a patron, click donate on the website to give back to the show that gives you so much, any comments or feedback about this episode or any others can be sent to [email protected] I personally. Finally, read and respond to all the emails that come my way, reach out, take a breath, drop into your body, find the balcony seat and trust that everything is going to be okay.

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