When You’re Not The Mom You Envisioned

Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog, mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello my friends. How are you? I hope you’re doing well. I’m so happy to be here with you today. Today’s episode is so near and dear to my heart. There is an amazing Mom On Purpose member who wrote in to the membership asking for me to do a lesson on what I’m going to talk with you about today. And her question was so brilliant and something that I’m so passionate about talking about and teaching and helping moms with that. I asked her if it would be okay if I read it here and she graciously said yes. So today I have a message from you from the Mom On Purpose member who wrote in with this question.

Hi Natalie, can you talk about I’m not the mom I thought I’d be. I always pictured myself being a more patient and understanding mom, even though many people tell me that I’m a good mom and that I have really good kids and I do believe this deep down, but I feel I could be better. I feel I could be more patient, less yelling and more connecting. As a mom overall, I just feel like I could be a better mom. Please help. Alright, I love this question so much because of all of the reasons why I’m going to go through in this podcast. And if you know a mom who you think would benefit from this, like she’s a rockstar mom and she loves personal development, send her this because I teach this in a very different way that has been life-changing for me and for my clients and there is no reason for any mom to kind of think she’s not good enough based on the way that I teach this work.

And so share it with anyone who you think would love hearing it. Alright, with that, let’s dive in. There are three overarching tools that I want to teach you in this episode. Number one is the idea of what you thought motherhood would be like. So it’s part of our brain’s job to make predictions. This is really helpful and it’s also very flawed. So when you have an idea of what something’s going to be like in the future, it’s typically not accurate, especially when it’s something that we’re envisioning that’s a long time from now. So you know this, for those of you who have older kids when your kids were babies and you imagined what they would be like when they’re older, it’s very different than how they actually are. There are the challenges that they have now that are just different challenges than what you probably pictured.

The same is true for any type of envisioning that we do. So maybe you grew up wanting to be an attorney like me and then you became an attorney and you realize it’s a lot different. I don’t think this is bad or wrong, so I just like to tell myself, oh, of course the vision I had was different than what it actually is. And if you think about specifically with respect to motherhood, when we are young, of course we have this idea of what being a mom will be like because our brains, are much more limited. So we only kind of see what we can see with that limited awareness. And oftentimes it’s just the good parts. And on top of that, our brain has a tendency to romanticize the past and the future. That’s why, you know, I always say the best time to get started with this work is right now because there is no better time.

We always think that a better time is coming in the future. And that’s why I also don’t like to say, oh, those were the good old days because the brain only remembers the good parts of the past. And then in the future it does the same thing. So whenever I look at baby photos of my oldest, I resist the temptation to say, oh, I, you know, I want to go back there. I miss him as a baby. And I tell myself, it was really hard when he was a baby and there were awesome parts too, but it was both just like it’s both right now and it’s different and, and that doesn’t have to be a problem. So I think, and I am reading between the lines here, that the person who wrote in is saying, I always pictured myself being a, you know, more patient understanding mom, meaning what you pictured was very different.

You were not picturing the overstimulation, you are not picturing sleepless nights, you are not picturing the other challenges that come up and that’s okay, nor should you, right? It’s not like we need to go tell little girls, you know, being a mom is so hard in all of these things. It’s just that as adults what we want to do is tell ourselves the truth and the simplest mind shift that I love for when I do something or become someone or have a future idea that becomes reality and it’s different than what I thought. I love just telling myself, oh, I was just wrong about what I thought that would be. Like, it’s different and that’s okay. So in this case, I was just wrong about what being a mom would be like and that’s okay. And when I think back for myself about what I thought being a mom would be like, it’s so much different. Of course, I didn’t have all of the, the details, imprinted in my mind. I just had this vague idea and I was not imagining the sleepless nights and I also wasn’t imagining the beautiful mundane sort of, uh, moments that just happen in everyday life. And so it’s not just that the bad is different that I didn’t imagine that, but also the good is different. So any time that you imagine something, you visualize something for the future, I still think that’s useful, but it will be different as it plays out. When I was building my business, the vision that I had for it is this vision, but it looks so much different and I never tell myself I’m wrong or something’s gone wrong because of that.

I just know that there are so many things that I can’t predict otherwise we would just be, you know, fortune tellers and 100% accuracy. And we know that’s not the case. Just don’t make it mean something has gone wrong with the way that you are approaching motherhood. It’s more like a surprise. Oh, I was just wrong about what being a mom would be like, this is what being a mom is like. Of course I was wrong about that. I had limited information, I hadn’t experienced it yet and that can be a really good thing. So just tell yourself, oh, as a surprise, I was wrong about what being a mom would be like. Okay.

Tool number two is how you evaluate yourself as a mom and where you get your validation from. So in this example, this person is getting her validation for being a good enough mom from other people, telling her she’s a good mom as well as having good kids. The problem with this is it’s dependent on things outside of you. I always want to empower you. So if you define your success based on other people saying you’re a good mom or how well your kids are doing, it’s out of your control. You can’t become better in your skills, you can’t work on yourself, you can’t, evaluate how you’re doing based on things you can control. It’s entirely outside of you and that’s really disempowering. So shift the way that you are defining success as a mom and shift it to things that you can control. So I suggest coming up with evaluation criteria for yourself. As a mom, I love thinking about being a mom, like having a job in a company. And if you’ve ever worked in a company, you know that you are given a job description, you have a certain role, you have certain responsibilities, and then typically at least on an annual basis, sometimes more often than that you are evaluated.

And I think that you can do this for yourself as a mom. Inside the Mom On Purpose membership, there’s a motherhood toolkit and I give you five specific criteria to evaluate yourself on as a mom. This is all based on things that you can control so you feel empowered. You really need to evaluate you based on how you’re doing, not based on your kids because you don’t want your kids to have to perform for you in order for you to feel good about yourself. It isn’t fair to them and it’s also not fair to you. It leads to disconnection between you and your kids because your kids will then think that they need to perform a certain way to please mom. And this is also how we end up raising people pleasers. So let your kids be who they are. They’re going to be amazing and incredible and do wonderful things and they’re going to have challenges and they’re supposed to have challenges. Don’t equate kind of what they’re doing or where they’re struggling with whether they are good or not. Okay?

And that actually leads into tool number three. So I’m not gonna spend more time on that with respect to your kids being good because I think you’re going to get what I’m talking about here with tool number three, which is how you can separate out your identity from your actions. And when you do it for yourself, it’ll be just as easy to do it with your kids. So right now you are equating what you do to who you are. So if you yell, which is an action, then you think you are a bad mom, which is your identity. So your actions are determining your identity. So if you stay calm as an action, then you’re equating your identity with being a good mom. If you don’t stay calm, if you lose your temper, if you yell you’re a bad mom, I promise you that you will never feel like a good enough mom if you make your goodness dependent on your actions because you are a human being, you’ll always have actions that you could do better at and that is a good thing.

It can be seen as a really good thing if you separate out your actions from your identity. I like to think that your internal goodness is God-given you are completely whole and worthy and good inside your humanness means that you will make mistakes. So I love thinking about skills, with respect to sports. So if you play basketball and you’re not dribbling well, you wouldn’t make that mean something about you being a bad person or a bad player. You would say, I need to practice my dribbling skills. It’s a skill, but it’s not what determines whether you’re good or bad inside. The same is true for being a mom. You are a good person and you are a good mom. Your worthiness is 100%. So tell yourself that work on your identity on purpose. I’m a really good mom inside. That’s the identity piece. The action piece is about skills.

You can get better at skills from that place of wholeness, not from a place of lack. It’s a much better approach. You will feel so much more confident and inspired and just enjoy motherhood so much more. So for example, if you notice that you want to be more calm and yell less, work on that as a skillset. You are practicing not as something you need to do in order to be good enough. Just like your kids in school don’t have to get a’s to be good kids. They’re good kids just by their pure existence, no matter what they do. I love telling my son that there is nothing that you could do that would make me love you any less. You are good inside no matter what you do. So your kids’ actions reflect skills they may or may not need help building. So if your child gets a D in science, for example, he’s not a bad kid. He’s a really good kid and he needs some help with science. Science is a skill that he can learn and improve his skillset in. When you separate out identity from actions, it is life changing because then you can work on your skills from a place of goodness, from a place of growth just because you want to, not because you’re trying to earn being good enough.

So I have an example actually from earlier today. I was scrolling on Instagram and I saw someone on there who has the most magnificent refrigerator. It is organized so well and she cleans it out weekly and uses containers and has this whole system of organization for her refrigerator and meal preps for her three kids. And she does this every single week. And I think I spent probably 15 to 20 minutes just scrolling her page. I was so blown away. Now, I didn’t make that mean that I’m a bad mom for not doing this already or that I should have already known how to do this or that because I don’t take everything outta my refrigerator every week and have the right containers that somehow I’m less than. Instead, I was really inspired by her organized refrigerator and I made it mean I can’t wait to improve my skill of organizing my fridge.

So you can work on any skill that you want. If you want to work on yelling less and staying calm and being more patient and increase in connection, all of that is doable. But you want to do it from a place of improving that skill and getting better in that area. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be a better mom. You are the exact mom your kids are supposed to have. Your kids are supposed to have a human mom. Your kids are not supposed to have a robot mom who’s never yelled, who says the right things all of the time, who is 100% perfect. You are 100% good inside because you are here and you have a beautiful, wonderful, perfect soul. And that soul is in a human body that makes mistakes and that’s okay. The more loving and self-compassionate you are to yourself, the easier this will be.

And then the ripple effect that it has on your kids is just so, life-changing. I think back to kind of the example I gave earlier with respect to, you know, kids and their challenges. And it’s just such a part of our culture to say that kids are a good kid or good job or gosh, you have such good kids. When kids perform in a certain way that is pleasing to adults to kind of what we see as socially acceptable and what we prefer. And the problem with that is we don’t frame it in a way that celebrates the skill. We don’t say, oh my gosh, you are so skilled at science.

We say you are a really good kid. You are so good at school. And then they make that mean that they are good and good inside when they perform well. The problem with that isn’t really that part of it. It’s what happens in the inverse because no one’s perfect. So when they have an area of their lives where they are struggling, they think it’s bad or wrong to struggle because they don’t get the praise, they don’t get the kind of reassurance that they’re still good when they make mistakes or when they mess up. And this is why when you separate out your identity from your actions, it is such a life changing tool and experience because you end up doing that with your kids and you teach them that there is nothing that they could do that would change their goodness. Are there skills that they want to work on that you want to help them work on?

Absolutely. Just like that’s true for you. And just like, that’s true for me. But when we work on validating ourselves and not getting that validation from outside of us, not getting the validation from Instagram, from our neighbors, from our kids, you know, and how well they’re doing from how clean our house is, when we give ourselves our own validation that we are good inside, we are whole, we are worthy, then it’s actually so much easier to repair when we make mistakes to be authentic, which actually is what connection is, and tell our kids, oh yeah, I messed up there and I’m so sorry and I’m working on yelling. I yelled because I didn’t manage my emotions well. We’re able to repair so much more easily without justifying our actions, without blame, without any of that because we’re already kind of taking care of ourselves internally.

We already know that we are good and nothing we do can change that. It actually makes it so much easier for you to want to work on these skills because then you don’t make it mean something about you. There’s not so much pressure and you just want to do it because that’s who you want to be. Like if you think about working at a job, if you want to get better at Excel, you’re not super excited to be better at Excel so that you can finally feel good enough. right? You just want to get better at Excel so you can do your job better. That’s how I think about motherhood. I’ve been thinking about motherhood as this high performance job with all of these different skills and there are skills I’m naturally good at. There are skills that I’ve worked on to get better at, and there are skills that I am just downright terrible at and I look forward to working on those skills.

And that is from a place of, because that’s who I want to be, not because I think somehow my internal worth and being a good mom will be influenced. So the way that you talk about being a good mom and the way that you talk about all of this really matters because you can say, I’m a really great mom, I’m a good mom inside and some skills that I want to work on are yelling less, being more patient and connecting more with my kids. That’s a very different than saying, I feel like I could be a better mom on the inside. They’re just two totally different things and they will feel different. It’s motivating, energizing, inspiring, to work on new skills because that expands your skillset and do that for you because that’s who you want to be. Don’t do that because you’re trying to earn your worth.

It not only just feels terrible, but it just doesn’t work because you will never reach perfection. And so you will always have this underlying mom guilt of feeling not good enough. And it’s just, you know, as Byron Katie says, one big misunderstanding, it’s a lack of awareness of how you’re thinking about it. So if you think about it differently, if you validate yourself and your identity and work on skills because that’s who you want to be, whether it’s yelling, whether it’s connection, whether it’s patience, any of it that my friends, that is a good time. It makes motherhood so much more enjoyable. It really puts your brain to work in like a fun way. You know, a job that really just lights you up or it, it might not be a job, it could be just something you enjoy. You know, everyone loves pickleball right now and you’re learning the game and you’re playing and you’re learning this skill that’s fun.

You can apply that energy to skills in motherhood. This doesn’t mean that you’re indifferent or disconnected or apathetic with respect to repair. No mom, at least no mom listening to this, wants to yell at her kids. So it doesn’t mean that you care less. It actually means that you are better at repair and you’re better at working on changing yourself because you’re willing to look at yourself, the messy parts of yourself, the parts that get triggered and angry and frustrated without making it mean something about you being bad. Okay? So work on your identity, come get coached inside the membership and get the tools that you need to work on these skills. So you have the mindset component where you really working on who you want to think about yourself as, like who you are, and then the skills in what you do. It is both pieces, my friends, and they were so, so important.

Thank you so much for being here. As a reminder, you can always call in and leave a message if you haven’t yet, I highly encourage you to do so. The podcast hotline is 8 3 3 3, ask Nat. That’s 8 3 3 3 2 7 5 6 2 8. I am so excited and energized for this next season inside the membership and all of the fun stuff we have going on. So I look forward to seeing you inside there as well. And if you’re already doing this work in there, kudos to you. Keep it up. We’re having a good time. And with that, my friends, I will talk with you next week. Take care.

Thank you for being here and listening. Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.