00:00 

You're listening to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 31, "Choosing My Life." 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. 

00:21 

Well, hello, everybody. Welcome today. I'm really glad that you're here and I appreciate you coming. Here we go. We're just going to jump right in today. Today we are talking about choosing my life. So isn't it amazing sometimes the path that life takes us on? I think when we're young we have this idea that we can do whatever we want. We can make whatever plans we think we want and that we can live a life that will bring us that. We think that if I live a certain way that a certain kind of life is going to happen to me. I think to some degree we do have a lot to say over the kind of life we want to live. But in a lot of ways we don't. 

01:01 

When I was young I obviously had this idea that I would never get divorced. That was just beyond my comprehension and yet here I am living life as someone who is divorced. And though a lot of that was my choice, much of it was not my choice as well. The circumstances bring about different things that we need to decide on and things that we didn't anticipate. So ultimately I can choose to be a kind person and that definitely will impact my interactions with other people and my self worth or I can choose to be an unkind person. And that will definitely impact my interactions with other people and my self worth. When it comes to the internal character types of choices I really have control over these. 

01:52 

But when it comes down to other types of decisions like where to go or where to work or how many children to have, who to marry, I also choose to give up a lot of control. But what I'm choosing to give up are control over my circumstances. Anytime I choose to interact with other people, what I'm giving up is control over my circumstances. But I think there's very few of us who would choose to live our lives completely isolated from any other person for our huge life because a huge part of who we are and the kind of person we become is in context of the connections I have with other people. So though we could choose to go live in the middle of the wilderness of Canada and be there by ourselves and with the bears and the the moose, that's not really going to help me always become the kind of person that I really need to be. But what I'm also doing is giving up control of circumstances when I connect with other people. 

02:55 

But the really terrific thing is that I still have control over everything else in my life. I have control over my thoughts, my feelings, my actions, and ultimately the results of my life. So if I can learn to get my thoughts in a better place, I can really have a life that, in many ways, turns out the way I always thought it would, or maybe it turns out even better than I thought it would. 

03:23 

When I was younger, I looked at people who were divorced with a lot of judgment. I've always been a bit of a fixer. If things are broken in my house, I like to get them fixed. I don't like that stuff hanging around. If people are broke, I like to fix them. Although now, since I've had all this amazing coach training, I like to help them fix themselves. But again, that can only happen if they want it to, right? But I've always just been a fixer. And I've never really been much of a quitter either. And divorce in my mind at the time seemed to be the ultimate in quitting. In my mind, you've heard these phrases before, "I didn't get married to get divorced," "marriage is a 100-100, it's not 50-50." Okay, you know those phrases that get thrown around all the time? Well, yeah, those phrases are great if you're in a healthy relationship. But if you're not, there's horrible. 

04:18 

But I believed those thoughts without seeing that situations are different for everyone. My ability to empathize with people was severely limited for most of my life. Because of that, I was very judgmental. When I was going through some really  tough times in my marriage, which was a huge part of my marriage, I continued to think that divorce wasn't an option. And I would look down on other people who weren't making it work like I was, right? People who were choosing the path of divorce. But the reality of the matter was I wasn't making it work. Both my ex-husband and I were in enduring a tough situation, but we weren't making it work. But I had this idea from when I was young that I should be able to control all of it, that I should be able to have a happy marriage, that I should be able to control whether we were partners and best friends. I should be able to control my happiness and his happiness, right? I thought that was my responsibility. 

05:20 

And because I thought these things were my control, I felt continual frustration, which caused me to act in controlling ways. I tried to dictate everything going on in our home, from the TV and the movies we watch, to the language and the appropriate topics of conversation. I tried to take control of everybody's salvation, not just my own. I felt I was responsible for making my husband happy and my children happy. I felt I was responsible for making sure there wasn't any contention in our home, that we had this idealistic, perfect, gospel-centered home. I felt that was all in my control. 

05:58 

I will say that I took the my responsibility for controlling all of these very seriously and that was a problem because over time I felt my life was spinning more and more out of control. I had less and less control over all of these things because, let's face it, in reality I never really had control over any of these things. If my children wanted to use a certain type of language, they would do it at school or they would do it on the soccer fields or they would do it at home when I wasn't here and they did. They did whatever they darn well pleased. If they wanted to watch a certain show that I didn't approve of all they had to do was find a way to circumvent the processes I had in place and hide it from me and they did. They always found a way to watch what they wanted to watch. 

05:58 

When working with other people I have to give up thinking that I can control the circumstances, especially when I'm dealing with older children and adults. But what is important for me to understand is the truth that although I can't control the circumstances, I can control my thoughts about the circumstances. My children may choose, they don't so much anymore because they're old. So my youngest is 17, but when they were younger my children could choose to bug and annoy one another to the point of insanity, right? And if you have children, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Can I exact consequences for that behavior? Absolutely, and if they're young I should. It's my responsibility to help them see consequences for their behavior, but can I control whether they bug and annoy one another? No. 

07:50 

Because even if I find a way to separate them or keeping from them from looking at one another, they will find another way to bug and annoy one another. If I tell them they can't speak to each other, they will start breathing in such a way that it is super annoying to the other person. And pretty soon the other person is screaming, "stop breathing like that!" And the other kid's saying, "I have no idea what you're talking about, I'm just breathing," right? You know how that works. If I decide to make them hug each other, to resolve these conflicts, they will hug so hard that the other person stops screaming because they're hurting them so much. "Well, you said I needed to hug them, right?" You know, you know the conversation. If you have kids, you have been there, okay? If I make them say that they love one another, they will do it with a tone in their voice that even sends me through the roof, okay? I cannot control all of that. Those are circumstances. I cannot control any of that. 

08:55 

And it's more and more obvious the more we look at how these kids work to circumvent our controlling behaviors that we can't control them. So even with the consequences they may still act in super annoying ways and these are circumstances we can't control. So learning to adjust my thoughts around all of these difficult circumstances is vital. So important it is the lifeline to my emotional well-being. And in your head you're thinking "blah blah blah it's not that easy and you just sound like little Pollyanna." I get that it is not easy and sometimes it does sound a little Pollyanna-ish but this really is the key to our finding a good place to live emotionally. 

09:46 

Finally I can control whether I am always angry and frustrated and upset at what's going on in my home or I can control whether I feel happy and content. I really can. The truth is that two people looking at any situation can see two totally different things. One person may see half truths as being completely dishonest while the other person sees it as protecting themselves from being hurt by someone else. Are either of those right or wrong? I don't know. One person may see laziness as a horrible disease that must be eradicated and the other person may see it as an amazing sign of ingenuity that they can  figure out how to get out of work. So there's going to be different thoughts about every single behavior. That's why when we work through the thought model we have to learn to separate the facts out from our thoughts right and when we choose to we can see both sides of the situations as well. 

10:57 

Now this doesn't mean that we start telling ourselves lies either. We don't start telling ourselves that half-truths are okay if we really don't believe that they are. But when we start identifying other truths, for example, maybe we start, someone that we know is telling these half-lies all the time, half-truths. And we may start thinking thoughts like, "wow, they must really feel insecure." Or maybe we have the thought, "they must not feel they can trust me with that information." This is when we start to see and understand the situation in a whole new light. And thinking about situations differently completely changes how we feel about them. Thinking, "he's just dishonest and I can't trust him," creates a whole level of anxiety or frustration or anger inside of us that we carry on. It creates a very different feeling than if I think, "I wonder why he doesn't trust me enough to tell me what's really going on." That thought creates some self-reflection, and it creates me looking at myself and how am I engaging with this person that they feel they have to tell a half-truth. 

12:15 

So although I can't control the circumstance, I can control my thoughts about the circumstance. I can control my personal reflections on my character strengths and my character flaws. I do have complete control over how I feel and how I act, which will ultimately change everything else in my life. There were a lot of circumstances in my marriage that I had no control over because in a marriage, it's two people. If the situation involves more people than just me, I can't control it. And most situations when you're in a marriage family situation involve more people than just me. Ultimately, when I would feel frustration or anger or annoyance, it really doesn't have anything to do with the other person. It actually has everything to do with me and what I'm choosing to think. 

13:12 

So life is going to take us a million places we never planned on. If you're farther down this path of life... I'm 51. I feel like I'm farther down. I don't feel like I'm old by any means, but I feel like I've had enough experiences at this point that I look back and I think, "am I where I thought I would be at this age?" And I just laugh. I just laugh out loud because there's very few things in my life that are where I thought they would be at this age. And I think most of us fit in that category. When I was younger, I would have bet my entire life that I would have never gotten divorced. There was no way that would have ever happened in my 20-year-old mind. But I found myself in a situation that I couldn't control, because guess what? I didn't have complete control over that situation. It involved another person. 

14:08 

So at some point, I had to realize that although I couldn't control the circumstance, I could control how I chose to think about it. I could choose to look inward and see what character flaws were manifesting themselves. And I did that quite often. That's why I always tell my kids that I'm so freaking awesome, is because I've spent so many years trying to fix myself. Because you hear all these stories that you can't fix the other person. Well, you can't. What you can fix is yourself. So I could choose to look inward and do that. Or I could choose to focus outward and see what character flaws were manifesting themselves in my spouse. And I did that quite often, too. I did that probably as often as I looked inside. But over time, I learned to separate myself out from the circumstances and to see things that were going on as just facts, things happening that I didn't have control over. 

15:05 

And then I learned to think thoughts that moved me to a better place, a healing and a healthy place rather than continuing to thoughts that just kept me stuck and feeling like a victim. And as I got to this better place, thinking more positive and self-reflective thoughts, that's when I finally began to start growing as a person and that's when I got to a better place. And then I continued on my journey of becoming the person that I envisioned when I was 20. My circumstance was not what I had envisioned, but I was. Life is going to take us all sorts of places we don't anticipate. 

15:47 

The only constancy in life is that it's not constant. We have no control over other people, therefore we don't have control over the circumstances that we find ourselves in. We can't control whether our spouse gets involved with pornography or has an affair. We can't control whether our children decide to get involved with drugs and alcohol. We can't control whether our spouse decides to love God and live the Gospel or not. We can't control whether our children decide to love God and live the Gospel. But what I can control is my growth through these circumstances and my growth starts with how I choose to  think. I can control whether I choose to shut down and beat myself up or whether I choose to become stronger and more loving and compassionate as a result of the circumstances that I find my life in. I can't choose the circumstances of the life I'm living, but I can choose how to live with the circumstances of my life. 

16:58 

Isn't growing up an amazing process? Getting to this place in life that I can see so much more clearly where I've been and what's happened and how to get where I want to go, love it. I love it. I love getting to this place of enlightenment. It's just exciting for me and I just feel like the longer I go, the more enlightenment I get and I love it. So here we go. If you would love some personal help from me to work through some of these thoughts or to work through another difficult situation you may be going through, get on my website tanyahale.com. You can book a free 20 minute coaching session to get you started and you can see if coaching's your thing or not. You can see if what I work through with you works for you. I would love to help you work through some stuff. 

17:49 

So if you feel this podcast is helping you, please take a few minutes. Just subscribe. That way you'll never miss an episode. It just pops up on your iPhone and says, "hey Tanya put out a new podcast today." Leave me a review. I would love to hear what you have to say and your thoughts on what's going on and share this with other people who you feel could really benefit from these thoughts and understanding how we can live a better, happier life. Have a terrific day and I will talk to you next time. 

18:19 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email: a short and 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 learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!