00:00

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 249, "Finding Rest." 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

Alright. Hi, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. Thank you for joining me. I just really appreciate that I get to show up here for you and you are showing up here for me and we get to do this work together. This is some of the most important work I've ever done in my life. And I just feel really called to share this information with you because it has made such a huge, huge impact in my life. 24 years of a pretty dysfunctional marriage and now I'm in one of the best spaces I've ever been in in my life as far as how I'm able to show up and what I'm able to create. Yeah, Sione has a lot to do with that, but mostly it's amazing because of how I'm choosing to show up and the tools and the awareness that I have. So this is what I hope to share with you: a better place, a healthier place. And I hope that you are finding some great things here.

01:15

So along with that, wanted to remind you that I do have two masterminds that will be open for one more week. They start on April 12th. So registration for those closes on the 10th at midnight Eastern time. Okay, so if you're interested in these, make sure you get signed up. The one of them is called "Life after Divorce." We're going to be talking about healing after divorce. What it takes to divorce is just a challenge and it's hard. And I know a lot of us have a lot of healing to do after that space and coming to love ourselves again. And then how do we move forward as well? Healing and moving forward after divorce is really the focus of that. My goal is to have you end this class with more awareness, with more healing having gone on, feeling more confident in your ability to move forward, and happier with the place that you are in. It may not be your ideal space, but we can be happy in whatever space we're in. So that is our goal with the divorce class.

02:20

The other one that I'm doing is "Better Relationships." And this one, we're just going to be talking about all the things that it's going to take for us to have better, stronger relationships and helping you to recognize your own blind spots. We all have them and we all show up in dysfunctional ways in our relationships. And if we can start to identify our blind spots, we can start to make some progress and to move forward. And the amazing thing about better relationships is that nobody else has to change. You can create better relationships all on your own. So my goal here is for you to see blind spots, for you to start engaging in relationships where you feel more fulfilled and you feel better. Okay, so you can go to tanyahale.com, click on the "Masterminds" button at the top, and you can look at those classes and sign up for them. I would love to have you join us. They are both capped at eight participants so that there is enough space for everybody to have an opportunity to participate. And if you're not a big participator in these, that's okay as well. When other people participate and share ideas, you will be able to learn and grow and figure things out in a different way. So I would love to have you join us there, if that's your kind of thing. If you love to talk about this kind of stuff and don't feel like you get enough of it in your life because you don't have people that like to do it, this is a perfect, perfect opportunity.

03:48

Okay, so let's jump into the podcast today. We're talking about finding rest. So two Sundays ago, Sione and I were attending church in a congregation in Virginia, and the topic was on finding rest in Christ. And they use scriptures about when Christ says, "come unto me, all ye that are labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." And the one about when we're invited to enter into the rest of the Lord. And they also used the scripture about taking his yoke upon us and finding rest unto our souls. And this has caused me a lot of thoughts in the last little bit about how so many of us are so heavy laden. We're burdened down with all sorts of things. I work with clients who are struggling with divorce, with unfaithful spouses, with disengaged spouses, with adult children who they're struggling to connect with. And all of these things are really heavy. These things can be really difficult to work through. And I was thinking about how Christ says that if we come unto him, we will receive rest, even in these things. So how is that possible?

04:56

So a few weeks ago, when doing the Come Follow Me reading with Sione, we were reading the scripture where it says, "come unto Christ." And all of a sudden it just hit me that it sounds like a lovely phrase, but not one that I had thought very deeply about. "Come unto Christ." Okay, what does it really mean to come unto Him? Just to read our scriptures and say our prayers and go to church and the temple? I'm not sure about that. One thing that I am learning for sure at this middle-aged stage of my life is that I know coming unto Christ won't be a checklist. Sione and I discussed how for us at this stage, we feel it means to learn how to become more like Christ in the way that He thinks and feels and acts. Learning how to accept and love people where they are. Understanding how to offer others grace the way Christ does for their humanness. And set aside our unrighteous judgment. In all honesty, so much of the work that we are engaging in with this work, I believe is helping me to come unto Christ, to find that rest, okay? I feel that learning to clean up my love, learning to forgive and accept others and communicate honestly is showing up the way that Christ would. And I feel that in these last several years of doing this work, I have come so much closer to Christ in many different ways. I feel that I understand at a level that I couldn't before what it means to really love unconditionally. This doesn't mean I'm great at it, but I'm understanding it and I'm moving closer to it. This space of being more aware of my thoughts, of moving out of a disempowered victim mentality and more into an empowered hero stance. A place where I accept responsibility for how I'm showing up helps me to feel closer to Christ. And that feels really good. And might I say, it even feels restful? Restful means my soul feels more at ease, not uptight and stressed, but not meaning that I'm getting a nap every day either.

07:06

So what I want to talk about more today is how this work then propels us into the space of finding rest. Now, I do not consider myself to be a spiritual leader and I am not looking to set myself up as an example of following Christ because, heaven knows and God knows and Christ knows, how imperfect I am at showing up Christlike in so many situations. But I do feel that the work I am engaging in with coaching has helped me to come closer to Christ, to think and feel and act more in alignment with how he does. And I feel it has done this for many of my clients as well. We don't necessarily talk about this work as spiritual work, spiritual growth, but ultimately for me, it's really important. For me, that's what it has been. So today I want to share with you how I feel this work is spiritual work and how it helps me to find rest. The rest that comes from becoming more Christlike.

08:07

Now, when I start working with my clients, I let them know that this is a lot of work. It is work worth doing, absolutely but work nonetheless. It's hard to be told that you are playing the victim, that you are being controlling or that you are not being honest. It's hard to hear that you are being judge-y and you are not accepting of others differences. It's difficult to learn that you are overstepping your boundaries and that you are being passive aggressive or that you are being manipulative. And learning to become more aware of these things and then address them not only in your behavior but more importantly in your thoughts can be really, really tough work. It takes a lot of humility to come to coaching and lay your life open for somebody else to see, especially those parts of your life that you may feel some shame about.

08:56

At first glance, this absolutely does not sound like rest. It sounds horrible and it sounds challenging and it sounds scary. But here's what I love so much about coaching. It helps me see things that I am not able to see on my own. We all have blind spots, things that are holding us back, things that are keeping us stuck, that we don't have a clue even exist. And sometimes they're glaring and everyone around us can see them, and yet we're oblivious that they exist. And sometimes they are underlying thoughts and beliefs that are keeping us playing small and not stepping up to be seen and speaking up to be heard. Working with my life coach just this last week, I was given some amazing insight into thoughts that are keeping me quiet, that are not allowing me to show up as myself and speak my truths, thoughts that have not allowed me to feel at rest in this particular area that I'm working with, thoughts that I really was unaware of. And when we're engaging in thoughts like this and we're not aware of it, it's exhausting and it's exhausting for several reasons.

10:07

First, we are creating unnecessary drama in our lives. We are unknowingly hurting others. We are keeping others at a distance. We are creating stories in our heads that are not true and these things exact a lot of energy from us. We spend a lot of time in turmoil over why our relationships are not working and not being able to understand how to fix them. This is where I was for almost the full 24 years of my previous marriage. I was doing hurtful things and yet was completely unaware that I was doing them. I had no clue how to make things work better. I felt like I was just spinning and spinning and spinning in place and I couldn't figure out how to stop. And that is exhausting for sure.

10:53

Another reason it's so exhausting is that we find ourselves constantly blaming the other person and putting ourselves in victim mentality. And when we're in victim mentality, we don't have the power to change things. We're at the mercy of the other person, the villain in our story, to change before we can find relief. Being disempowered like this is exhausting. We find ourselves telling our victim story over and over and over to whoever will listen. We blame and we accuse and it feels horrible. It is not a place of rest. Another reason it's exhausting is because we are trying to control other people and that never works. When I spend my time ruminating over someone else's behavior, thinking about how they should be doing things differently, trying to coerce them or manipulate them or shame them into doing something differently...it's exhausting. When I start to nitpick what my husband is doing, and he doesn't change ,and then I get all upset about it and I feel frustration and irritation. Guess what? That's exhausting. When I keep thinking he should show up differently than he is. Then in my head I create a lot of drama about why he's not and I might start to think things like he doesn't love me enough. I'm not lovable. If I was a better person he would fill in the blank. These are exhausting thoughts. Always questioning our value and a worth as a person is draining. It leaves us powerless to create something different. When I think that my kids should show up differently, they should come over more or they should come over less. They should call and text more or they should call and text less. They should let me see the grandkids more or they should ask me to watch them less. They should offer to help me with household chores that are big and difficult for me. You name it. When I think anyone should be doing it differently, it's exhausting. And it's exhausting because there is nothing that we can do about it except show up in manipulative and controlling ways and just whining and moaning about it in our heads or to our friends or to them. And all of that is exhausting because there is zero forward movement in that. Everything stays stagnant when we try to control others because we can't control them. And when we think we can and we can't, it's exhausting.

13:26

So rest is when we let go of the expectations. Rest is when we let go of trying to control people we can't control. control. Rest is when we embrace agency for ourselves and for others. Rest is settling into controlling that what we can, which is only us, that feels powerful. Rest is actually stepping into the responsibility of cleaning up our lane and then staying in our lane. The reason this responsibility is restful is because it puts us in the driver's seat. It empowers us to enact change, to create what we ultimately want to. Have you ever noticed how exhausting it is to be sitting around and waiting? Airports bring this up for me. When I have a two-hour layover, it's just exhausting to be sitting around and waiting. And even the flight, even though I'm getting where I want to go, that just sitting is so exhausting for me. Long lines in an amusement park are also incredibly exhausting for me, just so much waiting. Caught in a traffic jam is super tiring for me. Being stuck is exhausting, whereas movement is exhilarating, even if it's taking energy. So doing this work, it is work, yes, but it is work with movement. It is work that is moving us toward our goal of stronger, healthier relationships with ourselves and with others. It is work that is creating a stronger, more empowered us. It is work that moves us forward into living the life we ultimately desire to live. Movement creates power, and this type of power is restful. This is the kind of rest that creates energy, not the type of rest where we completely veg out for hours, which is more like being lazy. Lazy is a lack of activity or exertion. We feel sluggish. We're talking about rest, which is a peace of mind or spirit, something used for support, being free from anxieties. Finding rest is not being lazy. Laziness breeds more laziness. It creates unproductive behaviors that keep us stuck. Think about the last time you binge watched a show or played a game on your phone when you hadn't scheduled it in. You just keep hitting play over and over and over. And by the time you finally garnered enough energy to shut it off, you were feeling worse than when you started and you feel all tired and unproductive and sluggish.

16:15

Rest, however, creates energy. It invigorates us and moves us forward. When we start learning to think more like Christ thinks, to feel more like Christ feels, to behave more like Christ behaves, we find the rest that I believe he is talking about. We find freedom from burdens that are not ours to carry. We let go of trying to control others and step into learning to control ourselves. We learn to honor and respect other people's agency just as Christ does and learn to love them on whatever path they are on. We learn to start bringing our thoughts and our feelings and our actions into alignment with the person that we aspire to be and we do it more often. We learn to accept and love others and ourselves for our humaneness, for our strengths and our weaknesses, for our amazingness and also for our awfulness. We offer compassion to ourselves when we fail at something, when we say something thoughtless or hurtful, because guess what we all do? We do the work to repair damage that we inflict and to make adjustments and to show it better the next time.

17:29

Finding rest in Christ, I believe, means that we learn to become more like Christ. And Christ is love without end, love without conditions, love without doubt. Christ offers wisdom and kindness and compassion to everyone that he comes in contact with and he does it without condition or expectation or resentment. So though reading scriptures, praying, attending church and the temple are all important, they're important not because of what they are, but for the person I become when I do them. They're important for the insight and the instruction that impacts my application, because the application of gospel principles is what helps us to become more like Christ. And that is when we find the rest we are seeking. It's restful because I'm not all up in other people's business. I'm not trying to control things that I can't. And I'm showing up more and more the kind of person I really want to be. This feels amazing. This feels like rest to my soul. In fact, I feel that these things have a great tendency to put us in the space of overflow that we talked about a few weeks ago.

18:50

So how do I think we find rest? I believe we become more like Christ. And I found that these tools and the concepts that we talk about here have helped me to become more Christlike. And I hope that you are finding similar patterns in your life. There's a lot of emotional rest to be found in cleaning up our lives, our relationships, and our thoughts. And this is an amazing space of middle age growing up. I love it so much. Coaching has changed my life and coaching has helped me to come closer to Christ. And there we go. That's what I've got for you today. Hope this was helpful. If it was, please go ahead and share it with someone who came to your mind when you were listening to it. That is one of the great ways that we can help to spread good information and make the world a better place with very, very little effort on your part. You can press the copy link button, send it to a friend in a text and just say, "hey, I love this. I was thinking of you when you were listening to it." You just never know the impact that we can make by sharing good information, whether it's this podcast or other podcasts or other information that you're finding. Let's be sharers of good words and good things. Okay. Love you, my friends. I really, really do. So grateful to have you here. Thank you for joining me on this journey and I will see you next week. Goodbye.

20:21

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!