00:00 

Hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 339, "Greatest Hits: 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. 

00:23 

Alright, hey there, welcome back to the podcast today. So glad to have you. And as always I'm just thrilled to be here with you and to get to share with you some content that really does make a difference in the quality of our lives. I love the the research that they've done that says that the quality of our lives depends upon the quality of our relationships. And I will just keep repeating that because we have to clean up our relationships if we are going to be more at peace, if we're going to be happier, if we're going to just enjoy our relationships better. And listen, I get it. So many of you are in miserable marriages. You are in tough, tough places or you just got out of a miserable marriage and you would love to have a good healthy one, and you just don't know how. And this is what I do. Like I help you understand what does it take to really create a beautiful, lovely relationship. What do I need to clean up in order to show up my best self in order to? Stay out of trying to control the other person and all this stuff. So this is what we do on the podcast. So I'm so glad that you're here. Thank you for joining me. 

01:38 

Before we jump into today's content, a couple of things. If you are interested in the Talk with Tanya, that is just an open forum webinar that I do second Tuesday of the month. The next time we're gonna do it is January 14th. You can go to my website tanyahale.com, go to the "group coaching" tab, and there is a place where you can sign up for that. You will get an email with the Zoom link to come to that. It is open forum, and I will talk to you about anything that you want to talk about. And depending on how many people are there, you can participate in a group discussion. You might even get some one-on one coaching if you're the only person to show up. You can ask me questions about my divorce, about my dating years, about my 90-Day relationships, about my marriage, about anything that you want. I am just happy to talk with you and share with you things that I have learned that have made such a huge difference for me and for my husband, Sione, and how we've been able to create something that is just mind-boggling. And we always just look at each other and go, who gets this? And it feels like such a miracle. And I guess we get it because we have busted our butts to clean stuff up, to understand things, to incorporate tools, and we still bust our butts on a regular basis to really just show up well. And so we can talk about all those things, whatever you want. 

03:00 

Also two classes starting January 8th. You are not going to want to miss these, especially if you have thought about coaching, but it's a little bit intimidating for you. You're not sure if it's the right thing. These are at a price point that is just ridiculously so much value for what you're gonna get. They start on Wednesday nights on January 8th. They're both going to run for nine weeks. The first class is called "Mindset Reset." We are going back to the basics of mind management. We're going to be talking about fixed mindset and growth mindset, these concepts from Carol Dweck who wrote an amazing book called "Mindset." We're going to be talking about the thought model, we're going to be talking about circumstances and how do you determine what a circumstance is? What's a circumstance? What's my thought about? About Deciphering what your thoughts are and how do we know? What's going on in our thoughts and is it a good thought to have, is it a bad thought to have? We're going to talk about how those thoughts create our feelings or our emotions. 

04:02 

So we're going to be diving a little bit deeper into emotions and how do we process those and why are they important and why do we even need to have those really really tough ones? Why did God give our bodies the capacity to have these tough emotions and how what do I do with them? How do I make them work to my advantage? Then we're going to talk about how those move into our actions and then how those actions move into the end results in our lives. So we're going to be doing some basic thought work stuff that is going to be really great, especially at the beginning of the year when many of us want to move into re-evaluating our lives, looking at what's going on. Oftentimes we set these goals but we get in over our heads and I think a better place to start than just setting a bunch of goals is to jump into some mindset work. 

04:50 

tTe next class I'm doing is called "Relationship Reset" and this is for single and married people alike because these relationships can be marriage relationships, they can be dating relationships, they can be relationships with our children, with our parents, with our friends. What creates a healthy relationship? And how do we reset it if we're in a bad place? When you're divorced, like I was, being able to start all fresh and new is brilliant in a lot of ways, but you really have to have the tools to be able to do that. And we're going to talk about those tools. If you are in a long-term marriage that is just not where you want it to be as far as your intimacy goes, then we're going to talk about the tools that are going to help you show up more as an equal partner, to help you be the person that you need to be and to affect the changes that you can make because you do have control over you and you can create a lot of change. Couples are welcome in this. it's just going to be a really, really great class. I'm excited for that one. So make sure you get signed up for those. If you are interested, they will run nine weeks. 

06:03 

And then the last thing, if you are interested in getting my end of year review, this is going to be one of your last chances to get on my email list to be able to get that. So you can just go to my website, the first pop-up that's going to come is going to have you put in your email address so that you can get my "weekend win" email. Those are meant to be read in two minutes or less. They're just quick and easy, but something to think about over the weekend. And this end of year review is going to be one of the most brilliant things you do to help you prepare for the new year. So you're going to want to make sure that you get that. 

06:40 

Alright. We are going to jump in. I am doing another greatest hits. Again, we're going back three years to when Sione and I were just first dating, and this podcast is called "Happy No Drama Holidays to You."The holidays seem to be a time where when our stress level gets high, when our emotions are running high, that we end up having sometimes a lot of drama that we just don't usually want to have. And I know that I have succumbed to this more than once in my life. And and it's just part of part of being a human. And so how do we keep a better handle on all of that? How do we especially we're running into the last week before Christmas, how do we settle down the drama? And that's what we're talking about today. I think you're going to love this one. So I'm going to turn you over and enjoy this. And I'll see you back at the end. 

07:41 

There's so much drama, so much drama around the holidays. And I wanted 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, OK, 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. 

08:21 

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 gonna 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? 

09:23 

So here we go. 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 gonna 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 gonna 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. 

10:15 

Okay, alright, come on. 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 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 magazine-worthy at Christmas. It's unbelievable. I love going over there, but guess what? That's kinda 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 and we see pictures on Pinterest or we see whatever and we start thinking that that's the expectation we should have of ourselves. 

11:24 

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, all right? 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, 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? They don't. The holidays don't change us, okay? 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. 

12:37 

That's the kind of work that I do with my clients, right? 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, okay? 

13:00 

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? What the what, right?" And some of you're going, "what? Only 15? That's pretty simple." Okay, wherever you are on that spectrum, we're just gonna 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, okay? I'm going to create this 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. 

14:27 

This is where we can see that our thought creates our result, right? 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? So 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 decides she's gonna 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. 

15:15 

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. 

15:46 

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. Love that model. Isn't that just fun? I love seeing how the thought model works out that our thoughts always create our results. 

16:43 

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. And let's get to work before the holidays are in us full force. Right? That is work to be done at a causal level. The cause. What causes all the actions. What causes the experience. Right? This is where we go. 

17:32 

So let's look at the next one. Thoughts about our expectations that we have of others. Alright. So many expectations ruin things. They just do. Let me give you an experience that I had when I was young in my 20s. living in Germany and when my ex-husband was in the military. 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 this program. 

18:20 

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. And we had this song that we wanted her to sing and we kind of had it all done, you know, and we asked her to sing it and she said, "okay." And then she came back and she wanted to make some changes to the song and she had opinions about the song and she other things that she wanted to change. 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 gonna ruin the party. Well, it's not party. They were not gonna ruin the program. 

19:22 

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 gonna ruin all the Christmas program? Absolutely not. And it wouldn't have, but what it eventually came down to for me is 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? 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. 

20:09 

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. 

20:43 

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 Jello Salad just like you? Guess what? It doesn't really matter. Drop the expectation, right? Whether the Jello 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. 

21:24 

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 is 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. 

22:02 

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. That's a double whammy, my friends, right? 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. 

23:05 

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. 

24:16 

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. 

25:29 

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 turned 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 the firemen were going up, and they knocked a picture off the wall. So nothing really destroyed, but we had to move out of the house. 

26:42 

And luckily, there was another military house across the street that they could move us into. 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 our house across 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. 

27:36 

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. 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 trying to 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. 

28:53 

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, but here it was three weeks before Christmas when that happened. And then I spent the next couple of weeks up to my eyeballs, trying to dig ourselves out of this mess. 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. 

29:32 

You know what, this is the deal, my friends, Christmas came and it was lovely and it was beautiful 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 really really really 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. 

30:14 

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, well it's gas, 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, that 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. 

31:58 

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? We really can learn to manage our minds around these things. 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 

33:14 

Alright. There we go. Just as pertinent in 2024 as it was in 2021 We have so much control over the drama that we create in our lives We just get to let people be who they are. We get to let them show up how they want and we get to let go of all of these ridiculous expectations that create the drama Okay, hope you enjoyed that one. Alright, my friends, if you are curious, if you are interested in working with me you have two options. I have those two classes coming up and if you want some some coaching for Christmas, and that's what you want for a gift, tell somebody who will get it for you if you want to take these classes, Tell somebody if you have a hard time buying them for yourself. This will change everything in your life, I promise you. Coaching is such an amazing way to see things about yourself that you've never seen, and to create a different reality than what you're living. 

34:18 

So if you're struggling with where you're at, if you feel like I want something different and I just don't know what how to get there...coaching is brilliant. The classes are available on my website. Also, you can go to tanyahalel.com. You can go on the "free consultation" tab and you can get on my calendar and we can sit down and we can chat, we can do some coaching, I can help you see your situation from a different perspective, I can help you understand how you are showing up in ways that are detrimental to what's happening, I can help you see things that you are just not gonna see on your own because we just don't see our own stuff, we just don't. This is why I work with a coach on a regular basis multiple times a month, because my coach helps me keep, see things I don't see, helps me to keep the perspective that I want to keep, okay? 

35:13 

So go to my website, get signed up for a coaching consult if that's of interest to you, and let's get to work. Let's make 2025 the most amazing year of your life. Maybe by this time next year you won't even recognize yourself because you have made so many changes in positive ways in the in the direction that you really want to. Wouldn't that be amazing? It's an option. I promise you, it is an option. Check it out. Hopefully I'll see you on my calendar. And if not, I'll see you next week. Have a great week. Bye. 

35:49 

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.