00:00

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale and this is episode number 275, "The Problem with Being Good." 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

 All right, hello there, my friends, welcome to the podcast today. So glad to have you here. Before we start, I want to remind you that I have two group coaching classes coming up starting on October 16th. They're going to run for six weeks each. They're both going to be an hour and a half long. They are group coaching because we will spend the first 45 minutes to an hour talking about content and discussion and answering questions. And then the last 30 minutes to 45 minutes are going to be coaching. So you can bring your circumstances, we can talk about them, I can coach you on them individually. Everybody in the group will be able to listen and learn from your experience and I know that sounds a little bit scary at first but it actually is a very safe, supportive community to do this in. And when other people get coached, you get to listen as well. And one of my favorite things that I love to do is to listen to other coaching calls because I always learn so much listening to other people getting coached and seeing the similarities between our situations and because I'm not emotionally integrated into the situation, I can see things so much more clearly. It's just a brilliant, brilliant model for learning and understanding and getting coached. And I would love to have you join me. I am going to have early bird pricing going on until the close of business on October 2nd. So that will be tonight actually when this comes out, this comes out on the 2nd. If you want the early bird pricing for either of those classes, you need to go to tanyahale.com and at the top there is a "group coaching" tab. Now the two classes that I am doing are "parenting adult children"" and dating after divorce." "Parenting adult children" is one of my podcasts that is downloaded the most as so many of us just struggle figuring this out and this is going to be some great discussion, some great coaching that we can offer for this and for the price and the opportunities that you are going to have to have some one-on-one coaching, I just don't think you can beat what is going on here, especially if you get in the early bird pricing. The other class "dating after divorce," this is one that several people have been asking me about. It's tricky and it's scary to get out there after you've been divorced. We're going to just talk about all the things. How do you make sure that you're in a good place to start dating? Once you start dating, how do you make sure that you're making good choices? How do you get the data that you need to pick a person who's going to be a good fit for you? I'm going to talk about all those things. It's going to be some great, great stuff. I'm super excited to get these started. Go to tanyahale.com. Go to the tab at the top that says "group coaching" and you can find out more details about those. Again, they start on October 16th. Early bird pricing is good through the end of October 2nd. When I get up on October 3rd, that will be one of the first things I do when I start my business stuff for the day, is to get the price changed on that. So check it out. I think you're going to like them.

03:41

Today, we are going to be talking about the problem with being good. So just to clarify, this is not going to be a discussion on what is good, what is better, and what is best. I think there's a time and a place for that. But today, I have zero desire to throw a shame blanket on you and smother you in thoughts that you're not doing enough and you should be doing more, you should be doing everything differently, and you should be making better decisions. I know that that really is kind of what we're doing here, actually, is figuring out how to live more of the kind of life we want to live, but we never want to do that from a place of shame. So here's the deal. If you're here, if you're showing up and trying to learn and implement, you are already doing an amazing job, my friend. You're doing great because this is hard work, and for you to be willing to engage with these concepts and try to implement these concepts, you're doing a great job. Will you be doing it perfectly? Absolutely not. You're not supposed to! No one, including God, expects you to do it perfectly. Okay, well maybe your adult children expect you to have done it perfectly in the past or even do it perfectly in the present, but that's another podcast, right? We can't cover all of that today, but we can offer those adult kids a lot of grace and compassion for where they are on their journey and we can continue to focus on what we can control, which is us.

05:15

So what we're going to be talking about this week is the idea of what it means to be good, to be a good wife, a good mother, a good daughter, and a good friend. Now, if we were to ask a hundred women to tell us what it means to be good in these different areas, we would receive a hundred different answers. And yet most of us have this ideal persona in our head of what it means to be good and it's causing us a lot of consternation. It is messing with our feelings of self-worth and it is smothering us in shame. So, where do our ideas of good come from? From so many different places. Our home growing up, our friends' homes, things we heard teachers say, things we hear at church, things we saw in movies and TV, and let's not forget the hours that we spend on social media. The list could be endless because we are inundated with different ideas from everywhere and our brain was always paying attention and taking notes of what we should be doing. And one of the most fascinating things to me is that many of the things we believe are actually in opposition to each other and yet we still expect ourselves to be doing them.

06:25

For example, we may believe that to be a good wife we need to be highly Hollywood sexual to keep our husband happy while at the same time feeling the burden of being the gatekeeper of morality in our lives and in our marriage and in our families. We may think to be a good woman we need to focus all of our attention on taking care of the home and our spouse and our children because the house of order is the house of God, and also feel a lot of pressure to add to the family finances by getting a job or running a stay-at-home business. We feel that a good mom should raise responsible adults so they don't need us while at the same time doing everything we possibly can to help them succeed even when they don't realize they need our help. You know we just jump in and enable them. I mean we just jump in and do things for them. Okay, we feel that if we're the Relief Society President we should always have the table decorated beautifully and be willing to drop everything in a moment's notice whenever someone needs our help while also keeping our family as our top priority. A good woman will always be selfless, put herself last but never have an empty cup. A good woman will eat healthy and exercise and look like she belongs on the front of a magazine but not be obsessed about her diet or exercise or about how her body looks. She will have a natural beauty and a glow about her face that always looked refreshed even though she stays up until 2 o'clock many nights helping one of her children through a crisis. She won't be obsessed with her looks but her hair will always be on point and she will have on just the right amount of makeup to accentuate her natural beauty. She will always dress stylish but also not spend much money on clothes or hair or makeup. She will be well-versed in all of the scriptures and the last 10 conference talks and also be well-read in the classics and the most popular self-help and fiction books and current events while never missing an opportunity to keep everybody happy and do all the things for them and go to everybody else's activities. She won't ever feed her family fast food, but instead will always have a healthy, home-cooked meal ready in 10 minutes or less, and a fridge full of healthy snacks that were all prepped last weekend. She will make sure that her family gets to Disneyland at least once a year, while also saving generous amounts of money for her children's education, all while on a limited budget, because she's an amazing budgeter. She will be the parent soccer team president for her children's team, never missing sending her college freshman their finals survival kit. She will fulfill all of her church responsibilities like a Pinterest queen, watch the grandkids three days a week, host weekly Sunday dinners with her children every week, and extended family once a month. Never miss a birthday for siblings or nieces or nephews or parents or children and friends, and she will decorate her home for every holiday and have it cleaned up and put away the next day by 9 a .m.

09:35

Okay, that's just a small snack of psychotic deliciousness that we partake of, and it's not only exhausting, but absolutely unattainable. We feel so much pressure to do all of these things and more. I don't know that we can ever escape society and church telling us how much and what we should be doing. And I'd imagine most of us engage in some people-pleasing behavior at some time or another because we want others to like us. We want people to think that we are good and we want to make people happy. If we didn't ever go there, we probably wouldn't be human. We are given these cultural ideas about what we should be, and when we don't reach this idea, we feel shame in our ability to fulfill them. Here's the thing, when we become preoccupied with all of these societal ideas about what it means to be good, we will generally be running on empty. We will generally be feeling inadequate and paradoxically, we will be consumed with ourselves. We will feel tired, out of energy, maybe depressed or full of anxiety. We will constantly be filled with the fear of other people's judgment and often seeking validation from others. We will be living a life inadvertently focused on our insecurities, always seeking to compensate for said insecurities. And as a result, we will not be showing up in our lives or in our relationships the way that we want. We will be living from a place of scarcity and an empty cup. We will never feel like there is enough of us to go around because let's be honest, there won't be. This idea of a "good" placed in front of any role that we have in our life is almost always based on other people's opinions and on societal expectations that we have adopted.

 11:29

And these opinions are false ideas about who we think we should be. If you remember from several weeks ago, should always leads to shame. Here is why it's so challenging to sort all of this out. All of these expectations about what it takes for us to be this good wife or mother or daughter or sibling or friend. They are the air we have been breathing since we were young. It just all seems so normal and our brain doesn't even clue in that it's not normal. And it's also challenging because all of these expectations are a moving target. They are all too often based on what other people set up as the standard. And guess what? No two people have the same standard. So we run into all of these conflicting ideas that keep us feeling like we're running around, spinning plates, trying to keep them all from falling and it's never ending. Something is always getting out of balance. We're frantically dashing here and there in our minds, and sometimes physically, always on our own case for not doing it one way and then beating ourselves up for not doing it the other way, not realizing that we're fighting a losing battle. And in the meantime, this berating of ourselves erodes away at our confidence, our self-love, our self-respect, our ability to show up as equals. It plays into our insecurities and our fears and we feel tentative and less than and insecure. And when we stand back and realize that all of this consternation is brought about by ideas in our head, just thoughts in our head, beliefs that are false, beliefs that are unattainable, that are fake, that are all too often, aren't even our ideas. Then we can start to settle ourselves down a bit, take a step back, look around, and start to breathe. We can stop running frantically from spinning plate to spinning plate and instead focus on our foundation.

13:36

We can start to settle our feet and get centered. I love getting to the place where I feel centered. The visual I have is me standing solid in a place that I choose to stand, able to reach out and care for the things that are important to me. And I'm not frantic, I'm not frazzled, I'm calm and deliberate. It's different than the visual that I have of being balanced. I don't like that analogy that people use often. Because "balanced" implies to me that I'm always on the verge of being unbalanced. All it takes is one thing to happen for me to topple over and all the plates fall. But being centered means that my feet are planted on where I want them to be planted. And they're not constantly shifting from opinion to opinion. So I get clear from me on my own values, my own beliefs, my own opinions, and then from this place, I make my own decisions about what "good" means to me.

14:37  

When my children were young, I often felt pulled in multiple directions about what it meant to be a good mom. I was raised by a mother who expected us to be very independent from a young age. We would walk to the store by ourselves. In fact, I remember walking regularly, when I was four, two blocks to buy her a Pepsi. She would give me money and I would walk to the store and buy her a soda and come back. And when I was young, when I was a teenager, like nine, 10, 11 and on, I would cook food for the family and we all had chores. We were raised to be people who would problem solve and figure things out. I remember one time, probably when I was about, I don't know, nine or 10, a friend's mom called my mom to discuss something that was going on between me and my friend, a fight we had had had or something. And my mom just said, "well, I'm not gonna get involved. It's theirs to figure out." She really wanted us to be independent. And I was 16 when my youngest sister was born. So I saw a lot of parenting of children younger than me. And I got to participate in taking care of younger children and helping out a lot. So when I had young children, I had similar expectations of them being independent and of how I would show up as a mother. And yet, by the time my kids came along, things in the world had changed a lot. I would let my second and my fourth grader walk four blocks to school by themselves. And that idea was always met with a lot of surprise from other moms in the neighborhood. The pressure was on to either walk with them or drive them because that's what good moms did. These other moms made sure their children were protected at all times. I don't even know if "protected" is the right word, but they were just more protective than I was. I had my children pack their own lunches in the morning, and they were responsible for remembering to take them. Sometimes this elicited a call from a teacher concerned that my child didn't have a lunch for the day, and she was always surprised when I didn't jump in the car and run one over.

16:49

It was a bit of a struggle for me. I identified very deeply with raising my children to be very independent, and I thought that that meant that I was a good mom. And then I was being presented with the idea that being more protective and picking up their slack was what it meant to be a good mom. And it was hard to reconcile this in my brain. Sometimes I stuck to my original plan, and other times I gave into the societal pressure and started doing more for my children than I felt comfortable doing.

17:23

Okay, and if you've been married, I'm sure you can connect with the pressures to be a good wife. For me in my previous marriage, it meant keeping the peace, making sure there wasn't any contention, but not having very good communication skills to do that. I just ended up gritting my teeth and white-knuckling the behaviors that I thought were expected. So many societal expectations about our roles as women and as wives. Keeping our husband happy sexually, keeping the house clean. We had to do all the food, all the taking care of everything, right? And my ex-husband had his ideas about what a good wife was from his life before, from what he saw and heard from his parents and grandparents and from TV and movies and other people in his life. And these expectations were also added to my to-do list of what it takes to be a good wife. And I really felt like I was drowning in impossible expectations. And often I felt like a failure. Especially when I struggled to find peace and partnership in that marriage, doing what I thought I was supposed to be doing, doing what I thought would make me a good wife. How could I be doing all the things I thought were expected and still not be good enough? Why did I still feel the sting of failure and even end up getting divorced?

18:43

So here's the piece that I was missing and possibly a piece you may be missing if you're connecting to what I'm sharing with you today. And this applies to every relationship where we just don't feel like we're good enough, where we feel like a failure and we feel like we're the cause of all the upheaval. Relationships aren't about all the things we do for the other person because we literally cannot do enough. We are not in charge of the entire relationship. We are not in charge of anyone's happiness except our own. And relationships aren't about whether the other person checks off all the boxes of what we believe it takes for them to be good. The problem with striving for this kind of "good" is that it is never attainable. We can never be all things to all people. We will never make all the people in our life happy. They and we will always be adding boxes to our check-off list. At some point it is imperative that we let go of all of these expectations and get into alignment with ourselves.

19:46

The best and healthiest relationships are about us being really clear on who we are, on the person we want to be and what our values are, and learning to live in alignment with all of these things. Being a good mother doesn't mean that I run around frantically trying to meet all the needs of my children for the rest of my life. It means that I am clear on the things that are most important to me. I align my life with these things and I set appropriate boundaries as necessary. Where we sometimes get hung up is when we have the idea that there is a right and a wrong way. With my independent style of parenting, it wasn't right or wrong, just as the parents who were more protective than me weren't right or wrong. It's just different. It's each of us taking our unique perspectives and strengths and weaknesses and putting them to use. I firmly believe that God sent children to my home who would thrive under my parenting style, that I was a really great fit for them just as they were a really great fit for me. And the children sent to another person's home would thrive under their parenting style, that whatever path they needed to walk would be available to them in the home that they were raised in.

21:04

"Good" then isn't a checklist of things to do. "Good" is an alignment with who we truly are, with who God created us to be, with our strengths and our weaknesses and with who we are capable of becoming. "Good" is knowing myself, being true to myself and showing up as myself. "Good" is learning to be responsible for who I am and for how I am showing up in my relationships. It is learning to be responsible for my own thoughts and feelings and behaviors and putting that before any outside expectations. "Good" is being aware of my strengths and my weaknesses and allowing my strengths to nudge the direction of my course, creating a safe environment for me to grow in the most valuable ways possible, in the ways that I can do the most good and tap into my possibility. "Good" is listening to our inner voice, the voice that knows our possibility and knows how to engage with life in a way that taps into that and that also creates energy. Our commitment to ourselves, to be our best self currently possible, is also a commitment to our relationships, to show up in our relationship circle that I talked about in podcast 244, to show up there with confidence, with vulnerability, with love, with compassion, with grace. When we align our engagement with others, with who we truly are and who we are working to become, then we start to tap into our own version of "good": our own sense of confidence and pride in who we are and the work we are doing.

22:50

This is when we start to step into that space of overflow that I talked about in podcast 238, a place where what we are engaging with in life and in our relationships is creating energy, rather than depleting it. The world's and society's version of "good" will never work for us. Growing into our own version of "good" is that sweet spot that will allow us and our relationships to grow and flourish. The problem with being "good" is that it's very often not our "good"...It's someone else's. Find yourself. Find your own good and you will find the capacity to have better relationships and a life that you can't get enough of. I love growing up, don't you? This middle-aged gig...quite the thing.

23:43

Alright, my friends, if you would like to talk about coaching with me, you can go to tanyahale.com. You can click on the "free consultation" tab. You can get access to my calendar and set up a time that will work for you that we can sit down and chat. Also, again, if you're interested in those group coaching classes, you have until when I get up, October 3rd, and change the pricing on those to get the early bird pricing. They're going to be great. If either of those are a good fit for you, check it out. If you know somebody else for whom they're a good fit, get them in touch with the information as well. They're going to be great classes. I cap them at eight people so that there is plenty of opportunity to ask questions, to make comments, to get coached. It's going to be a really, really great opportunity for whoever chooses to be in there. I hope that it's you if it's a good fit for you. All right, my friends, that's going to do it. Have an awesome, awesome week and I will see you next time. Bye.

24:41

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.