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Zoom In: The Power of "Right Now" in Taming Anxiety and Building Success · No Shrinking Violets Podcast for Women

• 0:00
  Mary: Hi, and welcome to a mini episode of No Shrinking Violets.
• 0:04
  Mary: I was reading the Sunday news today, my local paper, because I love a real newspaper and reading that on a Sunday morning when I can, because if you listen to this regularly, you know we have a puppy.
• 0:17
  Mary: So it makes it a little difficult to sit and be still for very long, which I'm gonna refer back to this puppy.
• 0:23
  Mary: His name is Alfie in a little bit.
• 0:26
  Mary: But anyway, so I'm reading the perspective section and I saw a headline, A Life Lesson, Zoom In on the Challenge right in front of you.
• 0:33
  Mary: And it was written by Heidi Stevens.
• 0:36
  Mary: She is a Tribune News Service columnist.
• 0:40
  Mary: And I loved the message because what she's talking about is really reframing something that I often tell people, and that is be mindful to live and live in the moment.
• 0:53
  Mary: She writes about some great examples in her column, and it also was a good reminder for me, even though I tell clients this often.
• 1:03
  Mary: So the deal is to just be where you are right now.
• 1:09
  Mary: I think we so often worry about what's going to happen later.
• 1:15
  Mary: So she gives the example, she's training for a marathon.
• 1:19
  Mary: And you know, a marathon is about 26 miles.
• 1:21
  Mary: And she was doing her first 10-mile training run, and she normally runs, I think with a partner or a group, but she was by herself, which of course makes this mentally harder.
• 1:32
  Mary: And she was talking about getting to whatever, mile five and then mile seven and just progressively hating it more and more and starting to think, if I can't even run 10 miles, how am I going to run 26?
• 1:49
  Mary: And then she reminded herself, well, I don't need to run 26 miles right now.
• 1:54
  Mary: I need to run 10.
• 1:56
  Mary: And I think we often do that.
• 1:58
  Mary: We are in a moment, maybe a moment that's difficult.
• 2:02
  Mary: And we start to worry if I can't even do this now, what's going to happen in the future?
• 2:08
  Mary: But really, we just need to handle now.
• 2:12
  Mary: And so it makes me think about when I was a high school counselor and I would meet with my students.
• 2:18
  Mary: I had students in grades nine through 12.
• 2:21
  Mary: And as we got closer to graduation, we would talk about what their plans were.
• 2:26
  Mary: And I saw the stress of that in many of them.
• 2:31
  Mary: Some people know, I don't know, from when they're eight years old, they want to do some certain type of career.
• 2:37
  Mary: And sometimes it's actually accurate.
• 2:39
  Mary: Many times it's based on what they've been fed by their parents.
• 2:43
  Mary: But sometimes we just know, we have an idea, here's what I want to do.
• 2:46
  Mary: And maybe it's not your whole life, but it's the next step.
• 2:49
  Mary: And that's kind of my point.
• 2:51
  Mary: That I would start to say to students, well, what do you want to do next?
• 2:55
  Mary: And what I would invariably hear is, well, I need to know which college I'm going to, and I need to know what major.
• 3:03
  Mary: And I would again say, Well, no, you need to know what college you want to try, and you need to know what major you want to start with.
• 3:12
  Mary: And they would be many times really taken aback by that.
• 3:17
  Mary: Because I think the message that we often get is that by the age of 17, which is crazy, we should know what we want to do.
• 3:27
  Mary: And when I transferred to working with a college population, they were already obviously in college.
• 3:34
  Mary: And so when there would be some of my students every semester who would either recognize that they are not in a major that they want to be in, or even bigger, they're not at the college they should be at.
• 3:51
  Mary: They are so stressed out by that.
• 3:54
  Mary: They have so much anxiety because they're seeing this as a failure, that I made this choice and it's been, it's wrong.
• 4:02
  Mary: And what I would always talk with them about is there's no wrong.
• 4:07
  Mary: You can't know what you want until you try something.
• 4:11
  Mary: And I think when we plant seeds like that, that you should know what you want when you're that young to do for like the rest of your life, that's kind of ridiculous.
• 4:25
  Mary: And I think it came from, you know, especially my parents' generation.
• 4:29
  Mary: I remember when I was going to change jobs, I was a school counselor, it was a really good pay scale.
• 4:36
  Mary: I was never motivated by money as much as I was motivated by the impact that I could make.
• 4:42
  Mary: And so I was getting ready to change jobs.
• 4:45
  Mary: And my mom was just really um kind of upset by that.
• 4:51
  Mary: And I remember she said to me, How can you just give up a job where you're making the money you're making?
• 5:00
  Mary: And it was really a glimpse into that mindset.
• 5:05
  Mary: My mom was born in 1927, and so, and I think she was one of like 11 kids.
• 5:10
  Mary: So, of course, you know, the the more that you invest in the one career path, especially then when there was a retirement system with many of these companies, you didn't change.
• 5:24
  Mary: You were sort of expected to not be fulfilled by a career, it was a paycheck.
• 5:31
  Mary: And I think especially now I've seen a huge change in that with our young people.
• 5:36
  Mary: And I I would theorize that it has to do with what they went through with COVID, but that's another, that's another episode topic.
• 5:45
  Mary: But my point in all of this is it's okay to make a decision for right now.
• 5:51
  Mary: What do you want to do right now instead of looking down the road and being so worried?
• 5:59
  Mary: And, you know, I had a client one time, and he was making choices about his house, a renovation project that he wanted to do.
• 6:10
  Mary: And he was so concerned about these little choices.
• 6:16
  Mary: What if I make this choice and I don't like it?
• 6:19
  Mary: And being paralyzed by this anxiety about these decisions.
• 6:25
  Mary: And it was really, really hard to reframe that for him.
• 6:30
  Mary: That, you know, you can change your mind.
• 6:33
  Mary: Or if it's an issue of, you know, I'm I'm investing all of this money, then move slowly.
• 6:40
  Mary: Don't make all the decisions, or you'll live with it.
• 6:43
  Mary: You know, the world's not gonna end if you make a decision.
• 6:46
  Mary: You're like, oh, I probably would have liked the other counter better, but I'm gonna live with this.
• 6:50
  Mary: You know, we it's all a matter of what do you want right now?
• 6:53
  Mary: What makes sense to you right now?
• 6:56
  Mary: And there's no way to guarantee that you're gonna make a decision that later you're not going to think, hmm, I wish I had done this differently, but you don't know until you do it.
• 7:09
  Mary: And so I think sometimes when we think about having a setback or we look at a situation where maybe we went even went the whole way to earn the degree, go into the career, whether we talked ourselves into doing it or we really thought, hey, this is going to be a good match for me, and later we recognize it isn't, that's knowledge.
• 7:36
  Mary: That's really what life is about.
• 7:38
  Mary: And so zooming in to be in the moment and just doing the thing.
• 7:44
  Mary: So I think this comes up with parents a lot.
• 7:47
  Mary: I think when they have young kids and they struggle and they think, if I can't get through this toddler phase, how am I ever going to raise a teenager?
• 7:59
  Mary: And Heidi Stevens sort of makes that point in her column.
• 8:05
  Mary: Well, you're not raising a teenager right now.
• 8:08
  Mary: You're gonna figure it out, and there's gonna be some days that are really hard, but all you have to do is get through that day.
• 8:14
  Mary: Okay, so now I'm gonna circle back to Alfie the puppy.
• 8:19
  Mary: We've had big challenges with Alfie, and I think we didn't really recognize how difficult it was gonna be.
• 8:28
  Mary: I mean, we're not young, we we raised puppies 20 years ago, and I had the puppy that I had quite different in his temperament than Alfie is.
• 8:40
  Mary: Alfie's very high energy, he's a digger.
• 8:43
  Mary: Um, I think that's the beagle in him.
• 8:46
  Mary: We're actually waiting to get his official DNA, but it's been very, very challenging, and also um the chewing, the biting, the craziness.
• 8:57
  Mary: Um, y'all know I'm a gardener ruining my garden, needing to dig plants up because they're toxic.
• 9:04
  Mary: All of those things, you can't anticipate all of that.
• 9:08
  Mary: And so I think in the beginning we had the puppy blues.
• 9:11
  Mary: We were like, what have we done?
• 9:14
  Mary: And a lot of that, you know, when you're sleep deprived, it's really um difficult sometimes to pull yourself out of that.
• 9:22
  Mary: But I'm gonna tell you, it's gotten so much better.
• 9:24
  Mary: We've built in a great support network because we are travelers and we knew that going in that we're gonna have to we want to travel with Alfie, but also we're not gonna fly him to Europe.
• 9:35
  Mary: So I think having that um that infrastructure and people that we know that will take him and watch him while we're gone, or we have a really great doggy daycare that we go to a couple times a week that's helping with training.
• 9:52
  Mary: So we've really built a great infrastructure.
• 9:55
  Mary: But my point being that at one point we were just thinking, when is this ever going to end?
• 10:04
  Mary: How are we gonna get through tomorrow?
• 10:06
  Mary: How are we gonna get through the next three months till he has his adult teeth?
• 10:09
  Mary: And really, all we have to do is get through today.
• 10:12
  Mary: And I think we lost sight of how much he's improved.
• 10:16
  Mary: And I think we lost sight of how much we have improved and how much we have learned and getting over, you know, our idea that putting it putting him in a crate is like punishment.
• 10:29
  Mary: It's not.
• 10:30
  Mary: I mean, we did it in a way that we taught him it's a safe place.
• 10:34
  Mary: And for most, most of the time, he really will just go right in there, he'll go to sleep.
• 10:40
  Mary: Um, it's been much, much better.
• 10:44
  Mary: But my point is that we would worry about the next day before the first day was over.
• 10:50
  Mary: And so we sort of decided one of the things we needed to do was to just be in the moment, get through that day, and also to have a sense of humor.
• 10:59
  Mary: But when we apply this to raising a human child, I think that we worry so much.
• 11:06
  Mary: If I'm struggling now with a toddler, like I said, how are we gonna, how are we gonna raise a teenager?
• 11:11
  Mary: Well, you don't have a teenager yet.
• 11:13
  Mary: Or guiding them to understand that if they don't make the team, or they do make the team, but they don't do well, that's just an experience.
• 11:25
  Mary: It's not a failure, it's not an indictment of their worth.
• 11:29
  Mary: It's knowledge.
• 11:30
  Mary: Or if they try something and they don't like it, they're allowed to stop if they've given it a real chance.
• 11:40
  Mary: And I think that's another thing that when I was a kid, part of the parenting was you signed up for this, you're gonna stick it out.
• 11:48
  Mary: Well, you get one life.
• 11:50
  Mary: So why would you continue to do something that you hate?
• 11:54
  Mary: Um, I don't think that builds character.
• 11:56
  Mary: I think discernment, I think being able to help a child weigh the pros and cons of continuing if they want to change their major, weighing the pros and cons of that.
• 12:08
  Mary: What else do you want to do?
• 12:09
  Mary: And it doesn't come down to how much money can you make with this degree.
• 12:14
  Mary: I mean, there are practical parts of it.
• 12:16
  Mary: How are you going to pay back the loans if you took loans to get an education?
• 12:21
  Mary: But point being that all of it is information.
• 12:27
  Mary: It really is the journey.
• 12:28
  Mary: And so worrying about what happened is just, you know, living in the past instead of being in the present, and worrying about what's going to happen in the future is just borrowing trouble, as my mom used to say.
• 12:44
  Mary: So I think the point is to actually just be in be in the moment you're in.
• 12:50
  Mary: And that's sort of what I was talking about in the beginning.
• 12:54
  Mary: That idea of mindfulness being in the moment is like zooming into your life.
• 12:59
  Mary: You know, when you struggle with something, that's data.
• 13:04
  Mary: It's gonna get better, or it's telling you this is not for you, or it's learning.
• 13:11
  Mary: You can't learn unless there is something that's stressed.
• 13:16
  Mary: So, what I mean by that is when you're learning new information, it's an effort, you know, it it's a it's taxing on your brain, it's tiring.
• 13:27
  Mary: Um, and I go back to Alfie, you know, being told that mental stimulation is more exhausting than physical stimulation.
• 13:37
  Mary: And that was like a revelation because I'm thinking, well, we got to run him, you know, till he tires out.
• 13:44
  Mary: And our puppy class instructor was like, no, like, think about when you have a really hard day at work or you know, a student that's really studied and taken a difficult exam, they're tired.
• 13:57
  Mary: And so that's a great reframe, but that's a stressor.
• 14:00
  Mary: And it's a stressor because it's changing the system, it's building new neural connections.
• 14:06
  Mary: So having patience with yourself, you know, you don't have to run 26 miles, you know, you don't have to be able to do a hundred crunches.
• 14:18
  Mary: If you start an exercise routine, you start with one.
• 14:24
  Mary: And we have so much trouble just being patient with ourselves.
• 14:29
  Mary: But be in that moment when you find yourself borrowing trouble and looking down the road at all the things that could go wrong.
• 14:37
  Mary: Remind yourself all I have to do right now is the task right in front of me.
• 14:44
  Mary: The other things will fall into place.
• 14:46
  Mary: And that is a really important lesson to help your kids know that life is in a straight line, that there's going to be high points and victories, and there's going to be low points.
• 15:02
  Mary: That yes, they are failures of a thing, but a person is not a failure.
• 15:10
  Mary: Someone can just fail to achieve what they wished they would have, but they're going to learn something from that.
• 15:16
  Mary: And there, the question is, okay, what have I learned and what am I going to do with that?
• 15:21
  Mary: So zoom into the challenge right in front of you and focus on that.
• 15:27
  Mary: The rest will come.
• 15:30
  Mary: So, thank you to Heidi Stevens for that article that I read today that gave me the idea to talk about this.
• 15:37
  Mary: So, those are my thoughts.
• 15:39
  Mary: Until next time, go out into the world and be the amazing, resilient, vibrant violet that you are.