00:00 

Hey there, this is Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 175, "Happy No-Drama Holidays to You." 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. 

00:20 

Alright, hello there, my friends Okay, you can tell I'm a little bit sick still but before you think this has gone on forever, let me tell you that I am recording three podcasts three days in a row. So it's not as bad as it seems. And my COVID test did come back negative. Hallelujah, so I can go do some traveling this week because it is my fall break from school and I am enjoying it immensely thus far. Except I've been mostly sick. But I've been able to get caught up on some podcasts that I had fallen a little bit behind on and do some other things with my business that has been really fun and exciting and I've enjoyed it so much. 

01:03 

So anyway, this podcast is going to come out on November 1st and in the United States this tends to be kind of an unofficial kickoff for the holidays because we have a Thanksgiving that comes the third week. I believe in November...third or fourth. Okay, like I don't even remember at this point. Sorry, but it comes later on this month. We have a big Thanksgiving holiday which usually comes with some days off for people as well. And then right after Thanksgiving, of course, we jump right into Christmas and it's just like six or seven or eight weeks of just a blur of tons of holiday stuff. And there's so much drama, so much drama, around the holidays and I wanted to do this last year and the year before and I just got caught up doing podcasts and didn't think about it. And this year I'm like, okay. Look. I remembered. It's gonna be the first of November. Let's talk about how to have no drama holidays because so many of us create so much drama and guess what? Drama is all created in our minds with our thoughts about people and how they should or they shouldn't be or about the things they're doing or what's happening and it's all about the expectations that we create in our brains with our thoughts. 

02:27 

Okay, the holidays do not have to be stressful regardless of how people show up, regardless of how many times you might get frustrated, regardless of what gifts you got and didn't get or the kids got or didn't get or whatever else. We just have all these expectations, and let me tell you my friends, expectations destroy our peace and our happiness almost every single time. Expectations, you know what? There's times that they're beneficial, but most of the time they're really hard to live up to. And it creates this drama that we are going to avoid this holiday season, right? We're going to avoid it. Let's talk about how. So expectations. We're going to talk about them in three areas. First of all, expectations with ourself, expectations we have of other people, and expectations we have of the circumstances. Okay. So here we go. 

03:29 

First of all: ourselves. I know that very many of us, and I have done this before in the past, have always had this expectation that I will always be in a good mood, that I will have the spirit of Christmas with me or the spirit of the season with me, meaning that I'm going to feel generous and kind and loving and compassionate. And I'm just always going to be happy all the time. Okay. We have these expectations that we're going to buy the perfect gifts for everybody, that I'm going to have a house full of people, but I'll never get angry or frustrated. I'm going to get everything done weeks in advance. I'm going to do Christmas readings every night with my children or with my grandkids over Zoom, right? I'm going to create a magical space in my house. Okay. Alright. Come on. 

04:22 

So this is the deal. Most of that is out of our league. I know it's out of my league, right? It's just this perfectionist persona we have of what we think it should be. A Pinterest Christmas. Okay. Here's the deal with all the decorations, all the table settings. If you love it, if it creates energy for you, if it brings your joy, then guess what? That is so worth investing your time in. I have a good friend who is brilliant at that and she enjoys it so much and her house is like magazine-worthy at Christmas. It's unbelievable. I love going over there. But guess what? That's kind of not my thing. So for me to expect that of me, if you're like me and you just like decorations up, then let's drop the expectations of being super fancy because who says it needs to be super fancy? I think we look in these magazines or we see pictures on Pinterest or we see whatever and  we start thinking that that's the expectation we should have of ourselves. Guess what? We get to expect whatever we want of ourselves. And when we have these unrealistic expectations of showing up in a way that is not us, yeah, that's gonna create some stress. It's going to create some drama. Alright? We get to show up exactly like we do every other day of the year. And guess what? Not only do we get to, we are probably going to. The holidays don't change us. The holidays are just a circumstance. The circumstance never changes who we are. The circumstance just shows us who we are by how we show up. 

06:09 

Okay, so if you struggle with controlling your temper or with saying passive aggressive things, guess what? You're going to do that over the holidays. The circumstance of the holiday does not change the way that we think and interact with things. Although we've been a little bit conditioned to think that they do. Guess what? The holidays don't change us. If you're showing up that way and you don't want to, then there is more work to be done than just having Thanksgiving and Christmas roll around. That's the kind of work that I do with my clients. This work of looking at ourselves and saying, "listen, I'm showing up this way. I don't enjoy showing up this way. I want to experience life as a person who doesn't show up this way." That's the work that I get to help you do. I get to help you start showing up how you want to because having a holiday come is not going to change who you are. 

07:05 

So let me just put that in a thought model. I want you to see what happens. So let's say for Christmas...circumstance: you're going to have 15 people in your home for three days. Some of you may be thinking "what the what." Some of you are going, "what? Only 15? That's pretty simple." Okay, wherever you are on that spectrum, we're just going to put this as a circumstance. 15 people in your home for three days. Here's a thought: "I'm going to be happy all the time. I'm going to create this space where I'm happy all the time." First of all, that's an unrealistic expectation. Let's see how that plays out. If I think that thought, then what does that feeling give me? I'm supposed to be happy all the time. I should be happy all the time. It's going to make me feel uptight, me personally, right? And then that's going to show up in my action line. I'm going to start being fake. I'm going to start holding in my emotions. I'm not going to set boundaries, which then is going to build resentment. I'm going to start being passive aggressive. My perfectionist persona is going to come out in full force. And the result is I don't show up as me and I'm not even my normal happy. I've notched it down so much because I'm so uptight. Right? So not only am I not happy all the time, I'm not even my normal happy. This is where we can see that our thought creates our result. The thought that I should be happy all the time creates the result that I'm not even my normal happy, because we can't do that. Right? 

08:45 

So let's put let's change the thought here. Okay. And so same circumstance: 15 people in my home for three days. What if we have the thought instead that "I love that my home is a comfortable gathering place"? For me, I love that thought. I love that family comes to my house and feels comfortable opening my fridge and going in my pantry and just finding stuff to eat. And that when my sister comes, she just like decides she's going to make something and she starts making it in my kitchen. And I love that, right? I love that my home is a comfortable gathering place. For me, the feeling that that creates is a feeling of being relaxed. And then my actions, when I feel relaxed, that shows up. I take time to enjoy the company. I allow for mistakes. I let my kitchen get messy. And then I just go in and clean it up if it's not cleaned how I want it. I just do that. It's not a big deal, right? I drop the perfectionist persona thinking that everything I do has to be done right. And I allow all the emotions to come. If there's a day where I feel a little bit frustrated with things, I allow myself to feel that frustration. And here's a trick. We can feel frustration and it does not have to show up in our emotions. We can create a space in there. I probably should do a podcast on the space between the feeling and the action, right? But I can just allow that emotion of "frustrated." If I feel a little bit overwhelmed, a little too overstimulated because there's too much going on, guess what? I can go to my room and go read a book for an hour. Nothing wrong with that, right? And then so when I do all of those actions, the result then is that I'm comfortable with me in my space. I'm comfortable with how I'm showing up. So when I think the thought "I love that my home is a comfortable gathering place," the end result is that I create a place where I'm comfortable with me. 

10:41 

Love that model. Isn't that just fun? I love seeing how the thought model works out that our thoughts always create our results. So we have to be really, really aware of what thoughts are showing up and what they're creating. You are not going to be a different person just because the holidays are here. You will be the same person. So here's the deal: embrace you. Show up as you. Do you want a different experience than showing up as you because you don't like how you show up? Okay.  Then there is work to be done at a fundamental, causal level: your thoughts. This is what I work with clients as. If you want help with that, my friends, this is the perfect time to get in touch with me. Let's get to work before the holidays are in us full force. That is work to be done at a causal level. The cause, what causes all the actions, what causes the experience. This is where we go. 

11:37 

Let's look at the next one: thoughts about our expectations that we have of others. So many expectations ruin things. They just do. Let me give you an experience that I had when I was young, in my twenties, living in Germany and when my ex husband was in the military, and I loved that experience, by the way, and they asked me to be in charge of the musical Christmas program for our church that year and it was our Sunday program and I'm not like especially talented in music. I mean, I played the flute in high school in the band right, so I know music, but I'm not specifically particularly talented. But I'm good at organizing things, so they put me in charge of this program. Well as we were making this, we had a song that we wanted to be sung and there was a girl in our ward who was even younger than me and she had a beautiful voice, beautiful voice, and we had this song that we wanted her to sing. And we kind of had it all done, you know, and she we asked her to sing it and she was "okay," and then she came back and she wanted to make some changes to the song and she had opinions about the song and other things that she wanted to change. 

12:56 

And I got with a couple of my friends who were helping me with this and ,you know how you are, especially in your 20s, we started chatting. Chatting about her and chatting about how she was going to ruin everything and we started to create all of this drama around the fact that she wanted to make a couple of changes. And they were not big changes, they were not going to ruin the party. Well, it's not party, they were not going to ruin the program, but we created so much drama about it and it just became this huge huge thing that it didn't even need to be. How easy would it have been to have just said "yeah, not a big deal," like is that going to ruin all the Christmas program? Absolutely not. And it wouldn't have. Okay? But we didn't want...well, I didn't! It eventually came down to me. I didn't want to allow her to show up as her. I wanted her to show up how I wanted her to show up and that's not very fair, right? 

14:01 

But we do that at Christmas sometimes. We expect other people to show up as something that they are not. We don't allow them to show up as themselves. So here's the deal: like how many women do I hear at Christmas time whining about the fact that their husband does his Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve. Guess what? Who cares? Who cares if he does his Christmas shopping three weeks before or on Christmas Eve? The fact that he's taking time to do Christmas shopping shows that he cares enough. Whether he does it three weeks before or the day before doesn't mean anything about how much he cares. It's just how he likes to do it. So, we need to drop the expectation that he's going to show up as us or show up as a person that is not him. If the person who is him does Christmas shopping on Christmas Eve, that's okay, right? Why do we think we need to have these expectations? What if your sister doesn't make the Jell-O salad just like you? Guess what? It doesn't really matter. Drop the expectation, right? Whether the Jell-O salad is like yours or not doesn't matter, right? Drop the expectation that she's going to show up differently than you know that she's going to. 

15:28 

We create so much drama with the expectations that people will show up differently than we actually kind of know that they will. Do you have a child who always shows up an hour late for everything? Here's a thought...Of course, she or he's going to show up late. I know it's going to happen, so I'm just going to plan for it. Stop fighting against who people are and how people want to show up. When we have expectations that they're going to show up other than how they are, that's when we create the drama. And here's another thing I want you to understand. Many of the expectations that we have for ourselves get pushed onto the other people in our lives. So do you expect that you're always going to be in the Christmas spirit? Do you expect that you're never going to get angry or frustrated and that you'll always be loving and kind and generous? Then chances are pretty good that you're going to expect everyone else in your life to show up always in the Christmas spirit as well. And then when they don't, when someone gets grumpy or irritated, then we get grumpy and irritated because they're not doing what we thought they should. And then neither one of us is living up to the expectations. 

16:52 

That's a double whammy, my friends. Alright? We've just created misery upon misery. Misery that they're not showing up and then misery that we're not showing up. Right? We create this misery with our expectations. Do you expect a certain gift from a certain someone and you just expect them to know? Come on. People don't just know things like that. Even your  spouse. So stop expecting them to know. Tell them. That's a novel idea, right? Do you want everyone to pitch in before and after dinner to get things prepared and cleaned up? We can't just expect everybody to know that. Ask for what you want. And ask before you're grumpy about it. Right? Ask when you're still in the Christmas spirit. "Hey, it would be great if everybody knows that we're going to need help getting prepared and these are the things we're going to need. And afterwards, I would love it if everybody does this." Ask for what you want. These kinds of unspoken expectations that we have create so much unnecessary drama in our lives. If we can learn to stop having expectations, especially unspoken expectations of other people and learn to ask for what we want, there's a no-drama recipe for you right there. 

18:21 

Okay, let's look at the last one: circumstances. Okay, is it Hallmark? Is it Pinterest or what is it? The expectation that everything will be perfect. The decorations will be perfect. The dinner will be fabulous. The conversation will be stimulating. The cleanup will happen magically all by itself. Nobody will have a gift that they question. The meals will all taste beautiful. Nothing will be burnt, blah, blah, blah, right? Here's the thing, my friends, we know this. We really don't need to be told this, but we kind of do because we create this stuff in our heads. Life is life. Things go wrong. Expecting perfection of how things are going to turn out just sets us up to be unhappy, to be unsatisfied. What we really remember about the holidays are the laughing, the game playing, the conversations, the emotional experience that we have, the deep conversations we have one on-one with that sister-in-law or that niece or nephew in the corner. It's rarely the gifts or the specifics of the meal. 

19:36 

I'm going to tell you about a Christmas that we had, again, in the military when we lived in Kentucky. We lived at Fort Knox for a while. We lived in these houses that were super, super old. They were probably 50 or 60 years old. And military housing that's 50 or 60 years old is not good housing. Anyway, so it was about three weeks before Christmas. And we had a babysitter at the house with the kids, and we got a call that said, "your house is on fire. You probably better come back here." And we were about an hour away up in Louisville. Louisville, Kentucky. And so we turn around and we headed home. And there had been some wiring issues up in the attic. And it had started a fire. And so our sweet babysitter got the kids out of the house, took care of that. Fire department was called. They put the fire out. Nothing was really destroyed. The only thing that was really destroyed was as the firemen were going up, and they knocked a picture off the wall. Nothing really destroyed, but we had to move out of the house. And luckily, there was another military house across the street that they could move us into. 

20:52 

But from the time that we got the call until the time that we got back there, they had gone to the holding company, which is like the prison there on the post. And they had gotten a bunch of the good behavior prisoners, I guess, and brought them over and had them start moving everything in our house across the street. So this was the process. Here's a bed, take three or four drawers, dump them out onto the blanket, pick the blanket up by the corners, carry it over to the new house, dump it on the floor. Our house, we got there and people were just, there were just people coming and going, picking up stuff in one house and moving it to the other. And our Christmas tree, they just kind of wrapped up in a blanket and it was a fake one and carried it over and put it down. And it was a mess. But I mean, luckily, nothing on it got broken because it was all breakable stuff. But the branches were all messed up and everything looked bad and everything. I mean, the whole thing was, it was just shambles. And by the time they got done, my living room was, I'm not kidding, at least three feet deep with a path walking through it to get to the back rooms. 

22:13 

And I mean, it was, I look back down, I'm just like, "Oh my gosh, what a mess that was," right? And Christmas was crazy. We spent the next week with the kids farmed out to neighbors and friends and cleaning and organizing. And my ex-husband had to go back to work, because that's how the military is. They don't care that you just had a baby or that you just had a house fire. You need to be at work. So he was at work and I was working all day, like trying to work my way through this mess of everything just in shambles, brought over in just piles and no organization to it at all. And it was crazy. And we had some great people who would come by and help, and people who would take care of our children. And luckily the military did put us up in a hotel for the week so we could work in the day and sleep decent at night. 

23:12 

But here it was three weeks before Christmas when that happened, and then I spent the next couple of weeks, like, up to my eyeballs trying to dig ourselves out of this mess. And luckily most of my Christmas shopping was done. But you know what? When Christmas came, my tree still had not been put back together, the branches were still all messed up, and we still had  all kinds of stuff in the living room and it was a mess. And you know what, this is the deal, my friends: Christmas came. And it was lovely and it was beautiful and it went. And my children had gifts and they loved it and we enjoyed each other and, you know, I look back on that Christmas and I'll tell you what I don't really remember any specifics about Christmas Day. I don't remember it being fabulous. I don't remember it being horrible. I just remember the couple of weeks working up to it and how stressful it was, and trying to take care of my house and do all of that. It's not about all the stuff. It's about how we want to show up. 

24:18 

And I think the circumstance of the holidays gives us a beautiful opportunity to see how we show up. I think it just magnifies the person that we are, and if we don't like the person that we're showing up as, let's take a look at that. Let's get some work done, right? Let's start learning how to show up better, the way that we want to be. When I think of the holidays, I always imagine myself at the end of the day sitting on my sofa. Maybe I've got my fake fireplace going on. You know, I guess, well, it's gas, but you know. But I'm sitting there. The house is quiet. I've got the Christmas lights on the tree, I'm drinking some hot cocoa, and I just have this deep feeling of satisfaction. And I don't think satisfaction means that everything went perfect. It doesn't mean that I got the gift I may have really been wanting or that the meal was way better or that the conversation was perfect. It doesn't mean all that stuff. To me "satisfied" means that I'm content with how I showed up. I was present. I was relaxed. I was kind. I allowed others the space and the grace to be themselves. "Satisfied" to me feels complete, it feels whole. And again, that doesn't mean perfect. It means good enough. It means that I know I showed up as good as I could and that I'm happy with how I showed up. 

26:00 

Have a very happy, satisfying holiday season, my friends. With no drama. We don't have to create drama. The drama is created by us. When that sister-in-law says something about how you cook the turkey, good for her. Isn't it wonderful that she has an opinion? Right? We really can learn to manage our minds around these things. Right? When your sister shows up, or your brother shows up, and the potatoes they brought are a little lumpier than you would prefer. Isn't that amazing that they brought potatoes? Aren't we grateful that we get to sit down and eat with them? We can manage our minds around this stuff. I promise you this is the gift of growing up. This is the gift of getting older. I'm so grateful. So grateful I'm not that 20 year old who was so unkind and so judgmental about a girl who wanted to make a few changes. I cringe when I think back at her, you know, I'm just so glad that I'm not her anymore. I'm glad to be where I am. And that is part of the magic of middle age. Love growing up. 

27:20 

And here's the deal, my friends, if you want help showing up different this holiday season, let's get in contact. You can go to my website, tanyahale.com. You can book a free 30 minute consult. We can talk about it. My coaching business has really started to pick up, which I'm going to tell you, I'm super excited about. But that means that I don't have a lot of coaching spots left at this point. I think I've got two available through the holidays. So not a lot, but this is a perfect time with 12 weeks of coaching. This will get you through the holidays and into a new year where you can learn how to show up better how you want to for the holidays. You can have a better experience. And we can do coaching through the new year and all the mind management about what that entails and how to move into the new year more the way that you want to. And with a mindset that's really going to move you forward. And it's a perfect, perfect time to gift yourself. Self-growth and growing into a space that you want to grow into. So gift yourself some growth this year if you're up for that. And let's chat and let's talk about it. Coaching is an amazing, amazing process. I am so committed to it and I love it so much. Hope you all have a really wonderful, fabulous week and I will talk to you next time. Ciao! 

28:53 

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!