00:00 

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 411: "When Staying in Your Own Lane Isn't Getting You What You Want." 

00:23 

Alright. Hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. So glad to have you here, and I'm so glad to be here. This content changes my life consistently and regularly, and I know that it changes the lives of other people. I get to work with clients and the experiences that we have together as we gain clarity and understanding just are so exciting to me and love getting to do this work. This is probably, besides being a mother and maybe a wife, one of the most meaningful experiences of my life. This work really speaks to my soul and I feel that it is also my soul speaking what I am meant to do here on earth. So thank you for being here. 

01:10 

If you, can I just ask, if you have not left me a review on Apple or Spotify, will you please do that? Will you please just take two or three minutes? It doesn't take very long to leave one. All you have to do is open it up on your app. I know on Apple, you just open it up, and then scroll down to the bottom and there will be a place where you can give me some stars and you can leave a quick two, three, four sentences about what you think and how hopefully this is helping you to move into a better space and greater sense of self and self-awareness. That would be fabulous. 

01:48 

And if you are listening to this on the day that it comes out, Talk with Tanya is tomorrow. If you want to come to that, you need to get on my website, tanyahale.com, go to the group coaching tab, and you can get signed up for that. You'll get an email that has a special link just for the Talk with Tanya and you can join us there. So just have the greatest discussions there. In fact, our discussions last month have prompted all of these discussions about staying in your own lane because I just realized that we need some more clarity and staying in your lane is so vital to healthy and good relationships. 

02:23 

So one last item. Again, if you listen to this and it resonates with you and you want to learn more and dig a little bit deeper, go down to the show notes and there you can find usually, I don't know, I get a little carried away sometimes, 10, 12, 15 other podcasts that will talk more about concepts that we talked about in the podcast to help you broaden your foundation of the knowledge that we're talking about here. So check that out if you want. 

02:53 

Alright, so today we're going to be talking about when staying in your lane isn't getting you what you want. So this was prompted by the fact that after I had had my last Talk with Tanya and we were talking about saying your own way so much, Sione and I were sitting at the counter one day and we were chatting about it because he had come to that Talk with Tanya class. And he says, "but how do you do this? Like, what happens when they don't do what you want? When you don't get what you want? How do you respond?" And we talked through a couple of scenarios and he's like, "oh, we should have recorded this because this was so helpful," the clarification. And so I thought, okay, so I'll record it and talk a little bit more about how do we respond? Like if I stay in my lane and my spouse still is making bad choices, what I consider bad choices, and choices that are impacting me in significant ways. What are my options? Where do I go from there? 

04:04 

So let's start off here. Staying in your own lane sounds like a really great idea, but it's very difficult when the other person is doing something that is so uncomfortable for us or that brings us a lot of fear. Because often what we want when we stay in our lane is their changed behavior. We want a positive response from them. "Listen, I'm doing good work over here staying in my own lane. And they should be doing good work getting in alignment with what I want." And I know that we probably don't say that out loud, but sometimes there's this little piece of us in the back that says, if I'm going to show up really well here, they should get in line with showing up really well. And they should show up good also. 

04:51 

But that is just not where we're headed here. And that is not what staying in our lane isn't about. It isn't about manipulating them to actually change their behavior. And so what do we do when we don't? So in our last Talk with Tanya, this was one of the first examples. We ended up, I think, with three or four of them. But one of the first examples was, "what do I do when my spouse is not eating healthy or exercising?" The context was that they are both a little bit older. They're not super old, but they're a little bit older. And she is very health conscious and has a lot of awareness around the food that she eats and how she exercises and what she does because she wants to be healthy as she gets older. 

05:40 

And she's concerned that her husband did not have the same level of conscientiousness around his health. He would eat foods that she deemed unhealthy. And in the big scheme of things, what she was expressing was a lot of fear. Fear that his current health choices were going to impact his long-term health. And so this can be a very serious concern because what happens five years from now? What if he has a stroke? What if he ends up needing a lot of my personal care? And the way that Sione chatted about it when we were talking, he says, "what if we end up having to wipe somebody's bum for years and years?" Like that level of caring for a spouse, for somebody that we love, when that could have been prevented had they taken better care of their health. 

06:51 

So this is a few things that I want us to remember, that we don't sign up for relationships because it's easy or because we're going to get our own way. We don't sign up to get them to agree with us and to live the way that we feel life should be lived. We sign up for relationships because it is a place for us to grow. It is a place for us to learn how to love better. It is a place for us to learn to honor agency. It's a place for us to learn how to truly become an equal partner, to be honest and kind. 

07:35 

And this is the challenge of relationships, that we don't get married for selfish reasons. I don't get married to be loved, but rather I'm going to choose to get married so that I can love. Right? We get to learn how to love. And marriage relationships provide a lot of situations that create growth and development in this area of learning how to love better. 

08:03 

So when I was single and before I started dating and working with my life coach, I came to the realization that my next level of personal growth needed to be in a relationship. I don't think that's everybody's answer to where they need to go, but that was my answer. I felt like I needed to learn how to love better. I needed to learn how to step into this selfless loving, loving not because I was going to get anything out of it, but because it was going to help me become a better, stronger person for myself. And I knew that I needed to learn how to love more cleanly and unconditionally. 

08:49 

And staying in your own lane is part of learning how to love. It is what I often talk about as honoring other people's agency, honoring and respecting that. So we're creating a space for the other person's individuality, for them to have different desires and wants and ideas and strategies than us. We are creating a space for differences in preferences and priorities. And inherent in this is that it means that you won't always want the same thing as your spouse and your spouse will not always want the same thing as you. As this client was talking about, you may care a lot about being healthy in many different ways, and they may not care at all, or they may care in different ways. They just may care more about taste and pleasure and convenience and ease than about cutting out sugar, cutting out processed things, cutting out all that kind of stuff. They just may have different priorities in what food is about for them. Food for them may not be fuel. It may just be pleasure. And here's the deal. Neither of those perspectives is right or wrong. They're just different. 

10:12 

So here's an analogy that I often use with my clients. I want you to imagine playing pickleball, which I love. So I'm going to use that analogy. When I hit the ball across the net, the other person then hits the ball back and then I hit it back, right? So I can hit the ball over the net and I can say, "I don't love that you're not eating very healthy. And I wish you would eat more healthy." And then they can hit the pickleball back and say, "yeah, I see your point. And I'm really not interested in that. I just really love this food and I want to keep eating it." Okay, then the ball is on your side of the court. 

10:56 

Now what? Now what are you going to do with that pickleball? Right? You get to decide, alright, well, this is where they're at. They don't want to change. So now what for me? How do I play this ball? Right? When they don't care about what you care  about at the level that you care about it, what do we do? Well, here's the first thing that I like to teach my clients. You absolutely get to have a say. You get to have an opinion. Well, not a say. You get to have an opinion. You get to voice your concerns. Okay. So you might say something like, "when you don't manage your diabetes, I feel scared because I don't want to lose you earlier than I have to." 

11:54 

So notice that you're saying "when, and here's the circumstance." Now, this is not a really good circumstance example. I'm just going to put that there because when you don't manage your diabetes, that can be a little bit subjective and we want to get down to specifics. So, and I don't know enough about diabetes to get down to the specifics, but you would want to be more detailed when you have an A1C that is this level and you don't eat this certain way with it, right? So we're going to be more specific. "I feel scared because I don't want to lose you earlier than I have to." 

12:32 

Then we're going to say, here's the circumstance. Here's how I feel. And I feel that way because I'm thinking this thought. The thought is, "I don't want to lose you earlier than I have to." Okay, so the reason that this works is because we're not attacking, we're not accusing, we're not blaming or criticizing. We are keeping it very neutral and we're just putting the facts out there about what we are experiencing. Okay, so we don't want to say, "I feel scared because you don't care about your health." Notice that as soon as we throw a "you" in there, we move into the area of attack, accuse, blame, or criticize. Okay, you don't want to say, "I feel scared because you don't love me enough, or because you don't care that I'll be left alone, or that you don't care about how this will impact me in years to come." 

13:29 

Notice how all of those, as soon as we throw in the word "you," it becomes judgmental and they're going to start putting up their walls of protection. Okay, that's what we do as humans. That's what our primitive brain is trained to do. And what we have to realize is that this other person is an adult human. They get to choose anything and everything that they want. And I want you to remember this. Most likely their choice doesn't have anything to do with you. He's not eating that extra burger because he wants to make you mad or because he wants your life to be harder in the future. He's eating it because it tastes good and he likes it. 

14:23 

Oftentimes we want to make their choices mean something about us, but we really get to separate that out and realize this is just his agency to have his own preferences, his own likes, his own desires. They're not trying to hurt you or scare you or dismiss you. They just want something different than you. And very often where we find ourselves being in trouble is when we make their difference of ideas mean something about us when it doesn't have anything to do with us. 

14:58 

Okay. So what happens when you do it right? When you do this on your own really, really well? Okay. When you own your own, when you're clean, when you identify your own thoughts and fears, you know, and they might still do their own thing. They might still choose to eat the stuff that you're concerned about them eating, which means they have hit the ball back into your court and they've said, "okay, and I'm still going to eat this way." Your options at that point is you can come back and you can attack and accuse and criticize and blame, or you can stay in your own lane and you can say you can manage your mind around it. You can collect data and you can make the best decision that you can. 

15:54 

There may be a situation where you're like, "listen, this is a non-negotiable for me. If you choose to eat this way, then I'm going to choose to leave the relationship." It could be a non-negotiable. Okay. I don't know. Everybody's situation is different, right? But maybe it's just a huge frustration. Maybe you just continue to be frustrated. But I want you to realize that your frustration comes from your thoughts that they should be doing something different. They should be approaching it from a different angle. Okay. And maybe when the ball is in your court, you just decide to see where things land. Because guess what? Ultimately, we don't know where they're going to land. We don't know what this is going to do for their health. 

16:42 

Occasionally we see these stories, right, where this person has drank Diet Dr. Pepper every day of their life and they're 112 or something, right? Or this person has smoked since they were 12 and now they're 97, right? We just don't know. Sometimes we have indicators, medical indicators, based on things that are, you know, tests that they've had or whatever, but generally we just don't know. So maybe you start to make plans for assisted living for your spouse when things get  difficult. Maybe you even decide that if they have a big health issue in the future, I'm just going to get divorced because their health is going to require too much from me, their poor health. 

17:31 

Now, probably most of you just went, what? Like that's a little serious. Okay, yeah, right? It is a little serious. But I want you to see that you do have options. You can say, alright, "I'm out of here. I'll stay with you eating bad, but as soon as your health gets bad, I'm out of here." You can say that if you want. You get to choose how to respond to that ball coming back over on your side of the court. This is your place of power. Literally, you could just walk away when their health got bad. That's absolutely an option. 

18:10 

And that doesn't land well for most of you because it's not in alignment with the kind of values that you have and the kind of person that you want to be. It's not loving. It's not kind. It's not patient. It's none of those things compassionate. And here's the deal. You alone get to decide what is in alignment for you. Who do you want to be? How do you want to be? And we get to learn to manage our own discomfort, our own frustration, our own annoyance. Those things come because of our thoughts. And most likely, generally, they come from a place that says, "oh, they should be doing it different." We use that dreaded SH word, right? Okay, I want to remind us, we can't should on ourselves or on other people. They shouldn't do anything except for what they want to do. 

19:12 

So we have to come to terms with our own discomfort, our own frustration, our own annoyance, because these emotions are ours to manage. It is not theirs. When we get frustrated in this type of situation, what we're doing is expecting them to change their behavior so that I don't feel uncomfortable, so that I don't feel frustration, so I don't feel annoyance. But that is not theirs to manage. It is ours to manage. 

19:41 

So how do we manage it? When they choose to hit the ball back and say, "yeah, nice thought, love, not happening," right? Then we get, then that's ours. The first thing we get to do is focus on what we can control, which is us. We can control only us. We cannot control them. So the previous concerns that we talked about, and I'm going to rehit those right now, but I want you, one thing we're going to want to do is ask, is this a true thought or is it a helpful thought? 

20:14 

Okay, so where we say, "I feel scared because you don't care about your health." Is that true that they don't care about their health? Maybe it is, maybe it's not. Maybe they care about different things than you. Maybe they do care, but their focus is on something else. So is it a helpful thought that they don't care about their health? Well, depends. This is how we figure out whether it's helpful. How does it show up in your result line? When you think that thought, "my spouse doesn't care about his health, what emotion does that create?" And what actions are driven by that emotion? And do those actions create the kind of person that you want to be, the kind of relationship that you want to have? Is it a helpful thought? What we get to remember every single time is that this person has their agency, their individual autonomy. They get to choose whatever they want to choose. And we get to learn to manage ourselves around other people's agency. 

21:25 

Here's another thought: "I feel scared because you don't love me enough to want to be with me longer." Is that a true thought? I don't know. Most likely we can't prove that it's true. Is it a helpful thought? No, because it exacerbates our fear. It exacerbates our feelings of not being loved. Right? So they're not helpful thoughts. They're not helping us to show up more engaged in the relationship. What about this thought? "Because you don't care that I'll be left alone." Is that a true thought? I don't know. I guess we could always ask the spouse. But is it a helpful thought? How do you show up when you think that thought? Do you get all angsty? Do you start treating them poorly and backing off emotionally? 

22:20 

What about this thought? That "you don't care about how this will impact me in years to come." Is that true? Maybe they just haven't thought about it. Maybe they think that they're just going to die really quick. And where your brain wants to say, nope, they're going to be around and I'm going to have to wipe their bomb for the next 20 years, right? Maybe they just think, "oh, I'll just have a really quick heart attack and die and it'll be done. And I will have enjoyed all the food in the meantime," right? We just get to say, is it a true thought and is it a helpful thought? Is that thought helping me show up the best version of myself? Because the thoughts that we have become our results. 

23:03 

And so what kind of a fascinating thing about this is we tend, we have a tendency to swing to the other end of the spectrum, right? So we get into this place where we think "he doesn't care at all about me." But what we do then is that we swing far to the other side and we say, "well, I'm just not going to care about him at all. I'm just going to turn off my emotions. I'm going to turn off engaging with him." But this is also not in alignment with the kind of person that we really want to be. We don't want to live in fear on the one end of the spectrum, but we don't want to live in disassociation on the other side, right, here we just disengage. We don't want either of those because neither of those is in alignment with where most of us are. 

23:57 

What we're looking for is this sweet spot in the middle where we can express our concerns using the own your own. And then regardless of how they respond, we just continue to love. We figure out how to manage ourselves and our minds around their decisions. This is you learning to honor and respect their agency. And it is the next step of your progression as a human seeking to become more Christlike. 

24:31 

Here's the deal. When we talk about God's plan for us here on earth, our plan to come to earth and to become stronger, better, more loving, more like our heavenly parents. Agency is the key to this plan. And we get to own our own agency where I am responsible for my own choices. But the other side of this that can sometimes be so difficult in the space we're talking about today is that we have to learn how to honor and respect other people's agency to make whatever choices they want as well. This is what our heavenly parents are so, so good at. They allow us to use our agency however we darn well please. And they allow other people to use their agency however they darn well please, even if agency is used to harm or hurt another person. Agency is so important in their plan that they don't step in and change things. 

25:38 

So now we get to say, "okay, if this person gets to have their agency, how do I still show up with love in these spaces?" And I'm going to say, it's not always easy because the primitive brain resists allowing them to have their agency. And this is what we call, oftentimes we talk about the primitive brain is motivated by three things. One, it's motivated by avoiding pain. Two, by increasing pleasure. And three, by conserving energy. Those three things we call the motivational triad. And this is what motivates our primitive brain to do what it does. 

26:22 

And when we are in this panic place of they're not doing what I want them to do, it's because our brain is trying to avoid pain, the pain of something happening that we don't want to happen, increasing our pleasure, which means they're the ones doing the changing and not me. My life is much more pleasurable if they have to do the hard work. And conserving energy. If they will do the difficult work of changing their behaviors, then I don't have to do the difficult work. We've conserved energy. 

26:59 

Here's another piece I want us to think about, that we don't know the future. And so many of the fears in the context of what we're talking about today and the example that I've been using around food and what happens in the future, many of our fears are based off of thinking that we can predict the future. We can predict that this person will die earlier, that this person will have health issues, that I will have to take care of those health issues. But here's the deal. Anything could happen. Right? You might be the one to have a stroke or to become otherwise debilitated somehow. And that could happen next week, right? We just don't know. 

27:45 

And choosing to be in relationship isn't about being certain about the future because none of us can be. We are changing, growing humans, and our ideas change a lot and our processes change a lot and our priorities change a lot over the years. Relationship isn't about being certain about who this person is going to be as the years come and how life is going to treat them or how they're going to treat life, right? Relationship is about learning to be all in, learning to be fully committed, even when they're being a ridiculous human, right? It is learning to embrace their uniqueness and accept the uncertainty about the future with this person. 

28:38 

Relationship is about learning to quiet the fear, the voice of fear, from uncertainty that we all have and know that, listen, of course I don't know the future, but I know I have the capacity to work through it and to deal with it. I know that I can be wise. I know that I can figure it out. I know that I can learn how to be loving if a difficult situation like that shows up for me.  Knowing that you will act in alignment with your values, with who you want to be. This is what relationship offers us. The capacity to understand better what our values are and to figure out how to act in alignment with them regardless of what the other person does or says. This is being in relationship. It isn't about them doing what we want. It is about us embracing who they are. It is choosing to love even when it can feel scary or hard. 

29:49 

And I'll tell you what, it can feel scary when our spouse makes different decisions than us. When our spouse makes decisions that are different than the ones that we had anticipated and talked about when we got married. It can feel scary when we see them making choices that may not have the best outcome. But again, we can't tell the future. But it can be scary as our brain tries to predict the future because it always will. Ultimately, our celestial goal is to choose love when it's difficult to choose love. To choose to lean into love even when it's difficult to lean into love. To choose to invest more when things are scary and not less. Because love will always feel better than fear. Love will always feel more empowering than fear. Love will always bring more peace than fear. So when we choose to lean into love, when we choose to invest more in love, ultimately we will have a better, more satisfying experience. 

31:16 

That doesn't mean that your spouse isn't going to have health issues based on what they eat and how they exercise and take care of their body. But it does mean that we will be in a more peaceful, compassionate, loving space to offer more, to feel more love in that situation and not less. It is vital that we learn to assume best intent of our spouse, to focus on what they are actually doing and not on the things, the thoughts that our brain wants to come up with. "Well, they just don't love me enough." Let's assume best intent there rather than worst intent. "They do love me and they love french fries." They love that, right? Let's use the and. They can do both, right? Them not doing what you want doesn't equate to their love for you. It just equates to the fact that they're a human and from their point of view, the choice they're making works and it is the best choice for them. You don't have to understand it. You just have to learn to embrace them as a human, to accept and honor and respect their agency. 

32:39 

And this is where the difficult, difficult work of relationship comes in. Learning to be that loving person we want to be, to live in alignment with our values, even when the other person doesn't get in line with the same values. Because that's not their job to get in line with your values. It's your job to get in alignment with your own values. 

33:05 

So I hope this helped clarify some ideas about, like, listen, it's hard. I'm going to be, I'm going to be clear. It is hard when your spouse doesn't align with your values. But the true growth that comes here is not from our capacity to talk them into it. It comes from our ability to accept them and love them for who they are and how they are and be the loving person that we want to be, knowing that regardless of what the future holds, that those values and being in alignment with them will help me have the capacity to show up the way that I want to and to take care of things the way that I need to. 

33:46 

Okay, this is such an important part of growing up. Such an important part is learning to just accept the agency of other people. And I love growing up. The more that I have learned how to do this, the better my life has gotten. And the more my capacity to learn and grow in other ways has improved. Because I'm no longer caught up in the day-to-day drama of thinking that other people should be behaving the way that I think they should. It's a tough gig, for sure, and it's doable. And I'm also going to say, I am so not 100% proficient on this. I'm still sketchy at it at best, and I catch myself and realign myself more often than I used to. And to me, that's a win. And I hope that for you, as you work through this, that that's a win for you as well. 

34:45 

Now, listen, if you are struggling staying in your own lane, if you're struggling making peace with the fact that your spouse gets to do their own thing in their own lane, if this is just causing you a lot of consternation, please get on a call with me if you have not done so yet. You can go to tanyahale.com, go to the free consultation tab, and you can set up a free call where I will do some coaching with you and really help you see your situation more clearly. And I'll tell you all about my coaching program, about how I work with my clients to help them clean this stuff up, to help them make peace with the fact that their spouse wants to be a different person than them. I can help you see where you are straying out of your lane, and I can help you understand how to stay in your own lane better. 

35:34 

And when you start doing that, your relationships will improve so much, even if your spouse doesn't change at all. It's kind of one of those amazing, miraculous parts of life. That one person changing impacts everything so much. It doesn't mean your spouse is going to change their behavior, but it does mean that your perspective of what's going on will change everything about what you see. 

36:07 

Okay, if you have not left me a review, will you please do that? And that's going to do it for us today. Have an awesome, awesome day, and I will see you next time. Bye. 

36:22 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure 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.