Eps 307: 3 Steps for Creating What You Want In 2022

Transcription

Casey O'Roarty 0:00
Music. Hey friends, welcome back to the joyful courage podcast, a place where we tease apart what it means to be a conscious parent and a conscious human on the wild ride of parenting teenagers. I'm your host. Casey o'rourdy, positive discipline trainer, parent, coach and mom walking the path right next to you as I imperfectly courageously raise my own two teenagers. Joyful courage is all about grit. It's about growing on the parenting journey, nurturing relationships that provide a sense of connection and meaning and using influential tools that support everyone in being their best selves. Today's show is a solo show, and we are bringing in another new year. Listen for how grit shows up. Also, guess what? This is a super special episode. This episode is going to cross us over into a huge, huge milestone for this podcast, 1 million downloads. A million downloads, you guys of the joyful courage podcast. My first episode came out in January of 2015 we've been doing this for seven years. You guys, seven years, and this show is in the top 1% of all podcasts worldwide, and it's because you listen, you find value, you share the show, you come back for more. Thank you so much for making the show what it is for me and for everyone else who is tuned in, here's to another million downloads. How about that? Another million? Should we do that? Should we just do that in a year? It took seven years to get here, but let's just supercharge that and get to 2 million by the end of this year. How's that for a vision? Thank you for who you are and for being in the community. I really, really hope that you enjoy this show.

All right, yeah, here we are, Happy New Year. Happy New Year. I'm actually speaking into the future, because I recorded this podcast last week. So I have some questions for the future, some things that I will know by the time this podcast comes out. Did I end up going to California to see my family, to see my mom for her birthday? Did I catch the Omicron fucking Omicron variant? Have a ton of you signed up for my membership program? I'm hoping that by the time this is out in the world, I will know the answers to those questions. I hope I went to California, I hope I did not catch the Omicron variant, and I hope that a bunch of you signed up for my membership, because these are the questions that I have right now, while I'm recording, the answers will be revealed. The answers will be revealed. Hey, what did you all think about my interview with Rowan last week. Did you listen? Yet parts of our conversation really made my heart just swell with gratitude for all that she's been through and everything she's learned, and parts of the conversation made my heart ache, heart ache, but that's parenting, isn't it? The lesson I keep learning from her and just from the experience of motherhood is that we are all on our own, separate life paths with the obstacles that we are meant to have to teach us what we're here to learn, and as parents, we get to bear witness and validate their experience and support them in finding their way through. Because you all know the only way is through. The only way is through. But this show is all about today. It's the start of a new year. It's the start of a new year. I don't know about you, well, it kind of makes me think of that high school musical song

that's the soundtrack that's going on for me right now. It's the start of a new year. You know, there's this energy around right now is our big chance to make changes, to make resolutions, to make declarations. And I'm into it. I am into that energy. I like it. Maya Angelou says, If you don't like something, change it. If you can't change it, change your attitude. I really like that. It's super simple, and it's really, really powerful. And when I put this in the context of parenting teens, I think of all the things I can't change right things that I don't like that I can't change, like how quickly my teens get up when I ask them to do something, their mental health journey, their attachment to their screens, their. Music Choice, their grades, I could go on and on, and some of the things that I know parents in our community struggle with are things like teens getting up and out the door in the morning, their choice in friends or romantic partners, their willingness to hang out with us, the attitude you know, not to mention the context of the world right now, right this freaking pandemic that won't go away. Uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty, uncertainty. Ah, inequality, suffering, pain around the globe like it's a lot. There's a lot that we can't change, and there's a lot we have influence over, and that's what we're going to dig into today.

Last night was my last group call in my membership for 2021 and I took the mamas through a short process for visioning the 2022 we want. And I'm going to share that short process with you here. It's a three part process for creating more of what you want in 2022 and the three parts are reflection, celebration and re visioning. We're going to reflect, we're going to celebrate, we're going to revision. What can be 2022 and I actually made you a handout to use to take yourself through this process. So if you go into the show notes, there should be a link for a handout, lovely little handout that I made you that you can use to go through this process with me. So listen to the episode and then come back to the episode and move through the process, or pause the episode, get the handout, move through the process, whatever works for you. So the first step is that reflection, being in reflection, what big moments showed up for you this year. How did life unfold in a way that challenged you? Right? And these don't have to be like awful things, right? You know, sometimes really good things challenge us. I definitely had one incredible event this last year that I'm going to share more about in the coming weeks. Business wise, that is very exciting and super challenging, right? It's really amazing and hard, amazing and hard. So I want you to take inventory of your year, start in January, right? Start January, 2021 what events big and small impacted you? Use your journal or your planner, your calendar app, or even your social media feed, if that's a place where you share about your life, to remind you of all that you have moved through in 2021 there's a lot, right? There's a lot for all of us. Write it out. Capture it. Capture it, because there's power in seeing it all in one place, highs and lows. This is a list of your life unfolding. This is the ebb and flow of your year, the peaks and the valleys and the peaks again. So really take some time. Take some time to take stock in all you've been through this last year. Because I don't think there's anyone on the planet who had a boring 2021, right? So we're going to capture that. We're not going to judge it. That's big. We're not going to judge it. We're going to be an observer in the reflection, like, Oh yeah, that happened, and this happened, and that happened. I do not if you slide into, Oh, I really screwed that up, or that was when I really made that huge mistake. Or, you know, I catch yourself. Take some deep breaths, fill your feet on the floor. Come back to a place of being neutral, right the balcony seat, as many of you have heard me talk about that, that place of perspective, you're in reflection, you're in observation of the year that unfolded. Okay, that's the first step. That's the first step. And after you've done that, after you've done that, I invite you to move into celebration. So I want you to look back at the list that you made. So obviously, this podcast is one where you're going to hit pause a lot. It's not going to be an easy one to have. Well, maybe it is. You can listen to it while you're on a walk, but you're going to want to come back to it or while you're folding laundry. Have a pen and paper close by. So the celebration Part How did you grow this year? What parts of you expanded? Right? What qualities were you able to flex into? Because you moved through the unfolding of life? Right? Parts. Of you, parts of it, you may have been dragged through. Parts of it, you might have resisted. But as we know, resistance is futile, right? Parts of the unfolding, you may have risen to, you may have risen to the occasion. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what it looked like you moved through the unfolding of life, whether you wanted to or not, here you are. You're here now. So you went through the last year, however that looked, when you look back at your reflection, I want you to capture what you learned, how you grew through the last year. Like I said, what parts of you expanded, evolved? How are you different today than you were a year ago? What did your endurance teach you? And I want you to really open up to diversity in language, right? Diversity in language. I want you to really capture and name life skills like, yeah, resilience, perseverance, confidence, accountability, self awareness, right? Joy, courage. What are some other qualities that I'm guessing you probably lived into peace, calm, fierceness, right advocacy, there's lots of them. There's lots of them. And if you are kind of thinking, Oh, God, I can't really come up with any words, you can Google, you know, lists of strengths, then there's tons of stuff online that will just give you, like, you know, 100 different words for different strengths that people have, and go through it and grab the ones that you know were developed this year because of what you went through, because of your life unfolding, and write it down. Throw yourself a party. Right? Brene Brown says a crisis highlights all of our faults. We can pretend that we have nothing to learn, or we can take this opportunity to own the truth and make a better future for ourselves and others, right? 2021, 2020, my God, crisis. I mean, it's just kind of ongoing, right? And I think for many of us, for most of us, we got to really see those fault lines. I think too parenting teenagers really exposes the fault lines, right? Even without all the extra stuff. And we can come into this journey thinking that we don't have anything to learn, we don't have anything to change, that it's really our teens that are the ones with the problem, and that is a painful place to sit. And if you're sitting there, I am just pouring my heart out to you, because you must be deeply frustrated. The alternative is to recognize, wow, there's a there's a lot my child is teaching me. There's a lot for me to learn here. There's a lot for me to grow from. And that's really what this celebration section is about. Being in the mindset of, how have I grown? What have I learned? What am I continuing to learn? Right? 2021, continued to show us our fault lines. How did you navigate those fault lines? Take time to capture this on paper again. Use multiple pages. Pause the show brain dump your learning. Be in awe and celebration of who you are continuing to become and how you are continuing to transform. Because ultimately, that's what we're here to do. I think we're here to transform. We're here to learn, right? The challenges, the obstacles, life unfolding is happening for us right on this path of purpose and growth and transformation, and the final part of this process I'm calling revisioning, right? I'm calling it that because I'm guessing that you've already done some visioning right before in your life, you have a vision. Maybe you did this last year. This time, I'm going to create a vision for 2021, but when we break it down to what we're doing right here, right now, it's really about continuing to course correct, to get ever clearer on what we want to revision. Right to revision. Before we go there, I want you to go back and reread what you just wrote in the celebration part. Reread it. Underline what jumps out. Use the words and phrases that you've underlined for the next part of this practice. Okay, so revisioning, what will you carry into 2022 What will you continue to awaken? How will you support yourself in maintaining your vision? Right? This is about action. Yeah.

What we need already lives inside of us. Do you believe that we can awaken right? Some parts of us have gone dormant right or events and experiences life has kind of suppressed some of those qualities that life is calling for. Right now, I have a client who I started working with not too long ago, and one of the things that that was determined in our first coaching call, that was really missing was a sense of being a confident authority with her teens. And so I created a grounding for her, an audio for her to listen to daily. And it was, it's really all about awakening, awakening that confident authority that lives inside of her and practicing standing inside of that, not when she needs it, not in the high pressure moments, but just on a daily basis. Right? It's like working out. We have muscles right? As you know they are, what they are in this moment, but when we go to the gym and when we work out and we do high reps of certain exercises, we build certain muscles. So this client of mine is is working out her confident authority by listening to this grounding on a daily basis, and the feedback that I'm getting from her is just that that's the only practice she's been doing for the last couple of weeks is this grounding, and it's already making a difference in how she's showing up for her teens and how they're responding to her. So we already have what we need inside of us. We get to awaken it, right? And we all know what to do for sustainability, it's our willingness to keep up with it that matters. So last week, one of the things that I loved to hear Rowan share about last week is she shared a story about, you know the difference between who she is now versus who she was a year ago. And if you aren't familiar with our story, Rowan her story my daughter, she'll be 19 in a couple weeks, and she struggles with depression and anxiety and has been to some really dark places, and has also healed and learned and grown so much in the last few years. And so she was talking about, you know, the biggest difference right now for her is that she knows what to do to keep herself buoyant, to keep herself up. She said, Because of time and practice. She knows that hard times come and go. Right she has seasonal depression and right now it's, you know, the daylight is pretty short up here in the Pacific Northwest, but she knows that when she prioritizes things that keeps her in mental wellness. Life is easier for for her, right? When she prioritizes things that keep her in mental wellness, practices, tasks, life is easier. So let's all learn from Rowan, because we have influence. We do we can't control all the events or the experiences that will unfold this year. Who the hell knows what's going to show up in 2022 we can't control the behaviors of others. We can't control every outcome, but we can have influence. We can have influence over the outcome. Okay, and that's what this revision part of this practice is you've heard me share about this on the podcast before, and if you've worked with me, you know this formula, e plus r equals O. Write that down, e plus r equals O. Full credit to my mentor, Krista petty Ramer, my mentor and friend for teaching me this formula, e, events and experiences plus r, the response to those events and experiences equals the outcome. The place where we have power and influence is in the R, right, in our response. Being response, able, responsible, willing to respond. This is where we bring to life our vision, our revision for 2022 it lives inside of our response to whatever the year has coming for us, right? Whatever the year, the coming year, has in store for us, we can bring our vision to life in how we respond to life unfolding. So capture what you want. What will you carry? What are the the. Things that you underlined from your celebration section, right? What do you want to continue to grow? Right? What do you want to continue to awaken? What do you want to embody? This isn't about I'm going to make a million dollars in 2022 this is really about how do you want to feel? How do you want your relationships to feel, and how will you support yourself in maintaining your vision? Right when I think about this, when I wrote about this, actually, because I did write about this, I wrote about being rigorous, bringing rigor to my practice, and to me, what that means is, you know, having routine, and I and I'm like, Oh, I don't want to be rigid. And yet I want to be disciplined, right? And I love, I saw somewhere discipline is when you choose what you want most over what you want now, right? So keeping this vision, this revision, in mind, what is it that you want most? What is it that I want most? And in those moments of meh, I'll eat some more candy. Oh my gosh, you guys. My Yeah, the holidays have been my sugar intake is through the roof. Anyway. Side note, I know that I can be in the response that I want that's going to create an outcome that's closer to to my to what I envision when I'm taking care of myself, when my morning practice is, you know, it just happens when I'm getting enough sleep, when I'm eating well, when I'm moving my body. So when I think about those action steps, right, how will you support yourself in maintaining your vision? For me, it's about self care. For you, it might be about something else, but I invite you. I invite you for your revision of 2022, I want you to remember that it lives inside of your response to whatever this coming year is unfolding for us. And I'm here for it, man, I am here for it. I am ready for it. I mean, there is so much, so much that is can feel terrifying, right? If we really sink into it, there's so much that just feels really scary and and we get to choose how we make sense of it, what we allow to filter in our mindset, right? We get to choose our optimism, our pessimism. We get to we have choice in how we respond. I'm here for it. I'm here for you. I'm here for you. So capture all of that in the handout that I created for you. Capture it. Write it down. If this is landing for you. If you're into this work and you want to go deeper with me, I want you to know that the doors are open to the living joyful courage membership, this podcast today is really, you know, captures the work that we do. It's for moms of tweens and teens to really drop into the experience that they're having and to get the support and encouragement that they want most, that you want most, the living, joyful courage. Membership is a year long journey of self discovery and self growth inside of just the most special circle of women. And here's what a few of the members have said about their time in the program this year.

Speaker 1 23:57
I feel like, okay, now, it's starting to click. Now it's starting to click. I still make a lot of mistakes, but I don't give myself a hard time about it. I just kind of sit back and go, Okay, what would I have done differently?

Speaker 2 24:11
And I always feel like better about myself, about my parenting, just about, I don't know, I always take away something and it just Casey, something about how you run this, and just your personality, and I'm always happy that I've come once I'm there, I feel less

Speaker 3 24:26
alone, and a lot of the things that I'm going through with my kids,

Speaker 4 24:31
you're an amazing facilitator, and you've brought this group together, you've created this, and it's been incredibly helpful to Me and my parenting and just making it through, I

Speaker 2 24:42
feel seen in the brilliance and the messiness of my parenting.

Casey O'Roarty 24:52
Our kickoff call is January 12, so doors are only open for a limited time, and space is also limited. It, and it's filling up. So if you're curious to find out more, go to joyful courage.com/ljc joyful courage.com/ljc, and while the program is only open to mamas, I am offering a six week positive discipline class for members and their partners in February as a part of the program so partners can join us for that learning. And the rest of the year is all for mamas. So it's really good stuff. It's really good stuff. I want you to check it out, and I hope that this show was useful to you. I hope that you got a lot out of it. Feel free to share, share with me via email. Share in the joyful courage for parents of teens, Facebook group and yay, New Year. I love New Year's. I just love the idea of something new. I know you're hearing it right. It's the start of something new. Okay? I'll see you next week with a brand new interview. Thanks for listening, everybody.

Thank you again for being here. Let 2022 be the year you head over to Apple podcast and leave a review of the show. Listen, there's this whole algorithm to this podcast thing. And when you review joyful courage and give me five stars, the podcast will actually be shown to even more parents who are like, Hmm, I want to find a podcast about parenting. So please, please, please offer me that gift. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Also follow me at joyful underscore courage on Instagram. Joyful courage on Facebook. Don't forget about joyful courage for parents of teens, Facebook group, it's a really special place. Parents are like minded and, you know, supportive and amazing. I love connecting with you all on social media, check out the membership. Joyful courage.com/ljc. Doors will be open through January 12. I really hope to see you there. All right. Love You.