00:00 

You're listening to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number one, "This Is Us." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:22 

Well hello, my friends, and I have to say that literally because being my first podcast it's probably just my friends who are going to tune in at first. So here we go, "This Is Us." This is the title of today's podcast. I want to introduce myself a little bit and talk about my audience. Who do I want to share my knowledge with? My name is Tanya Hale. I'm 51. I have four kids that are mostly grown. Three are out of the house. My youngest is a junior in high school. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I have been my whole life. When I was younger I went on a mission and when I got home I got married. 24 years of a rough marriage and then I got divorced, which was not in my plans. I've always been a very fix-it up kind of person and I want to take care of things and make sure that they work. I found myself in a very unhealthy situation for many years, and after 24 years we got divorced. This was not something that was in my plans. 

01:28 

I think that's what most of us find is that we hit this middle age part of our lives and we are not where we thought we were going to be. Maybe we're divorced as I am or maybe we're widowed or maybe we never got married or something but we find ourselves struggling to come to terms with things that we weren't anticipating. Through the years I have made a lot of mistakes, but the amazing thing that I love about my life is that I've learned from the vast majority of those, and my divorce, though it was a very tough time in my life, and the years preceding that, I have learned so much, and the last several years since I've been divorced, my growth path has been on the fast track. I have learned so much about emotional health, and about healthy relationships, and I feel like it has helped me in my life coaching business so much that it's just, it's not even measurable. 

02:30 

I currently am teaching middle school as well, and I love that, I love the kids, and I love what I teach. I teach remedial reading, so I get those kids who are reading below grade level, and I enjoy those middle school kids so much. They make me laugh every single day, and it's a rare day that I have a bad day at work. I just have fun with them every single day. A few years before I got divorced, I was introduced to the concept of Life Coaching and I became fascinated by it. I've always been someone who loves personal development books, who loves learning how to live in a more happy manner and learning how to be have more self-discipline. I've always exercised a lot. So I became very fascinated with the life coaching concept. 

03:17 

So about four years ago I became certified by the John Maxwell team, which I loved my training there. I learned so much about really learning how to listen and really learning how to ask good questions and learning how to let people live their lives and how I could help them facilitate The life that they want to live. I really really enjoyed that. Currently I am getting a certification from the Life Coach School, which is mind-blowing to me and I absolutely love the processes and the patterns and then models that I am learning there. And this is what I want to share with you. I want to share greater ways to think better ways to think that help us to be healthier in our own lives and in our own minds and in our relationships with the people around us. It's fascinating stuff to me. I really get a kick out of learning about it and a lot of my friends think I'm a little bit strange, but oh my gosh, I just love it. 

04:17 

So who is this podcast for? I'm talking to women like me, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who have been through a little bit of time and we've had some tough experiences. We have spent years serving and giving to other people and oftentimes we hit this middle-aged part of our lives, maybe around our 40s 50s, and we just go "I don't even know who I am anymore, I have spent my whole life taking care of children. I've spent my whole life taking care of a  spouse. I've taken spent my whole life doing for other people. I don't know who I am." I've talked to friends who are like, "I don't even really know what food I like" because they've always made food for other people. They don't know what kind of movies they like or what kind of books they like. They don't have any idea where they want to go with the next step of their life. As their children are leaving home, many of them feel like they want to get out and do more in the community, either through a job or through service, and yet they can't even put their finger on what they enjoy and where they find their talents and their strengths. 

05:29 

I've talked to a lot of friends who got a college degree when they were younger, and then they chose to be a stay-at-home mom, and as their kids are leaving, they all of a sudden find that, well, you know what, what I got my degree and I'm no longer really that interested in, and I don't know what to do. And so they feel like they're starting all over. Many women never did finish a college degree when they were younger, and so the thought of going back is intimidating and daunting because, first of all they haven't learned in that type of an atmosphere for a lot of years. But also many of my friends struggle with even knowing what they want to do, what would they want to get a degree in. And the thing is we have had amazing, rich, wonderful lives, but we're not the same people that we were when we were 20. Motherhood has changed us, for those of us who are mothers. It creates in us a different kind of person. We spend our lives seeking to raise these children in a way that that we can be happy with in a way that we feel is best for them that will help them to be their healthiest and their best selves just growing up the process of the challenges and the struggles that we go through in life changes us it makes us into different people and these life experiences. 

06:50 

i can say that my marriage and my subsequent divorce changed me and i'm a very different person than i was when i got married at 23. And i have to say that the world has changed around us, which takes this person that we were when we were in our early 20s and sometimes this person doesn't know how to fit into the world anymore. Women now have way more of a voice than we had back in the 80s when i graduated from high school, and often we don't know. We don't know what our voice is and if we do, we often don't know how to speak it because it's a different world than what we were raised in. 

07:29 

Many of us were also raised thinking that we are responsible for everyone and everything. We think that we are responsible for our children's choices. We have this idea that we are responsible for how other people feel. We have this idea that we are responsible for our children's happines. If we're ma,rried, for our husband's happiness, or maybe our friend's happiness, or our sister's happiness our co-worker's happiness that we need to be the peacemaker, that we need to be the one that is responsible for making sure that everything runs smoothly and that everybody is happy and is in a good mood. We oftentimes feel that we are responsible for the house, either adding to the income or creating the whole income, depending upon our situations. 

08:16 

We feel like we're responsible for making sure that there is no contention in our home because we all know that that's of the devil. And if there's contention, then we must be doing something wrong. We feel responsible for making sure that there are clean clothes in our home and that there are healthy meals and that everyone has a big smile and is happy. We are responsible for making sure that homework is done and we have a clean house and that our children develop a good work ethic and that our children have strong testimonies. And sometimes we even go so far as to feel responsible for our husbands' testimonies. We feel responsible for all the budgeting and saving and making sure that we're prepared and ready for retirement. 

08:56 

The list feels endless, doesn't it? It just feels like we have so much that we're responsible for and because of that, when we find ourselves falling short of these expectations, we start feeling guilt and we start feeling shame. We feel like we are not enough. Like "if I was better at whatever, this would be happening." If I was more loving toward my children, they would not be turning against the gospel. If I was more kind toward my husband, he would not be in a bad mood or whatever it is, But we feel a lot of guilt and shame and this is the deal. We should not, we should not be feeling guilt and shame for things like that. We are responsible for us and this is where I want to go with this podcast. I want to meet guilt and shame head-on. I want us to realize that our lives have been valuable and amazing and important and though we have not been perfect, we have done exactly as we were supposed to do and that we have have done our best. 

10:11 

I can't think of one person that I know who does not do their best. We all are at different places in different areas and that's great, that's terrific, but you can't tell me that there are days that you just woke up and said, "oh today I'm just gonna try and ruin my kids' life" or "I'm gonna try and be the worst co-worker ever." We don't do that. We all struggle with things and we we have a tough time wrapping our heads around things and getting our feet on the ground sometimes, but every one of us is doing the best that we can and this is who I'm talking to. We need to learn to let go of unrealistic expectations, like, I don't know, say perfection. Maybe we can let go of perfection. Would that be amazing to be able to accept where I am and know that God is good with where I am because he knows that I'm trying? He knows that I'm doing my best. My best is gonna be far from perfect, as is yours, but my best is my best and God accepts that and embraces that. 

11:15 

I want us to learn to be responsible for ourselves and to let others people other people in our lives be responsible for themselves. I'm not responsible for anybody else's happiness. I am responsible for mine. If other people choose to be happy, great, love that, that's wonderful for them. But if they choose not to be happy that's not my responsibility. This is a place where we're going to learn how to be emotionally healthy. 

11:46 

The things that I have been learning the last few years about emotional health are fascinating to me. I think we often learn to turn off or to think that negative emotions are undesirable and yet negative emotions are vital for our growth and our movement and our happiness. Learning to be emotionally healthy, learning to feel the emotions and not bury the ones that scare us or the ones that are painful and learning not to numb or to buffer out those uncomfortable emotions, this is where we are going to learn how to make the most of conflict. Conflict is nothing more than two different opinions. How do we turn that into something positive? How do we learn to interact with the people that we love in ways that strengthen and build our intimacy and our relationships? 

12:35 

We're going to learn how to manage our thoughts because our thoughts are the basis of everything that happens in our lives. I have circumstances, but what I think about those particular circumstances impacts my feelings, which then impact my actions, which then impacts the basic results that I have in my life. And so if I can learn to trace my actions and my feelings back to my thoughts, I can learn to start having a healthier life and a more balanced life. We're going to learn here how to be more productive, how to be more realistic with the things that we want in our life, how to have healthier relationships with everybody in our lives, and that starts with setting good, strong, healthy boundaries. 

13:26 

Boundaries are kind of my thing. I love boundaries, and since I've started learning and studying about boundaries, I am so converted to good boundaries. And I see in the scriptures God and Christ setting boundary after boundary after boundary. What are the commandments if not boundaries, ideas about what is okay and what is not okay? This ability to have our voice and to speak it at this stage in our life, well, at any stage but many of us in our generation did not learn that that was okay when we were younger. This is where we can start learning that's okay and how to do that. 

14:08 

We're gonna find out here how to find our individual path and then how to stand stay on it how to go where we want to go. We're gonna learn more about love. What is real Christlike love? What does it look like? What does it feel like? How do we incorporate that into our lives? I've been fascinated with some of the things that I have learned as I've been studying love and learning about the true Christlike love. What does it really mean? We're going to start learning about how to set goals. How do we really accomplish the things that we want to? How do I feel less stress, less frustration, less anger? And how do I manage them when I do feel them? 

14:52 

These are all such amazing things. And this is the journey that I would like you to join me on. You know what? These are challenging years. These middle-aged years, they're challenging. But I feel like they are our best years. I have never felt more grounded. I've never felt more healthy and more in control of what's happening in my life than these last several years. And I love these middle-aged years. I think they're amazing. This is when we are really beginning to know and understand ourselves. 

15:26 

I think we go a lot of years spread so thin between little kids and houses and jobs and responsibilities and service and church callings and all of these other things that we get lost. And I think that these are the years that we really start to know who we are. These are the years that we really start developing confidence to choose for ourselves. We're way less susceptible to peer pressure than we were in our 20s and our 30s. And that is a great place to be, being willing to stand up for what we want and what we feel is right and being able to walk away when we feel that something is not where we want it to be. This is the time of our life where we start integrating a lifetime of wisdom into our relationships, into our choices and into our behaviors. 

16:15 

We're at a place where we have had some great experiences. If we can look back and learn from and glean from those experiences, the pearls of great price, the big pieces of wisdom that there is to learn from those, this is when all of these pieces of our lives start coming together and they start to come into focus so that we can really benefit from them and understand. them in a way that we couldn't when we were younger. I really believe that these can be and will be the most fulfilling years of our lives. There is so much about this age that is beautiful and amazing and there's no reason to not love where we are and learn how to handle it gracefully and beautifully and with a lot of joy and a lot of peace. 

17:07 

So I would love to have you join me on this amazing journey to self-realization and acceptance and learning that you know what I am enough. I am who God created me to be and your experiences have turned you into the exact person that you need to be to accomplish God's will here on earth. Each of us has a completely unique set of experiences and thoughts and relationships that have given us exactly what we need to be. I am a firm believer in that, and if we can learn to see those experiences that God has given us as learning experiences, I think that we can do amazing things. 

17:58 

So I hope that you join me here on this podcast on a weekly basis. I'm going to be putting out a podcast twice a week, every Tuesday and every Friday, and it's going to be an exciting journey for all of us, I think. On that note, if you would like some personal help from me with anything going on in your life, you can go to tanyahale.com and sign up for a free 20 minute coaching session where we can work through a situation happening in your life and talk about how you can best approach it. And then you can also learn about other options that I have beyond that if you're interested. So, thank you so much for joining me, and that's the end of today. We will see you next time on Intentional Living. 

18:39 

Hey, thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my "weekend win" Friday email: a short and a quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and to learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.