If you’re like most people, you want to change the people in your life. But, you can’t actually do that, and it causes problems in your family when try to change others.
Your power lies in how YOU show up, no matter what. Asking yourself this question: “Do I like the person I’m being in this relationship?” is a very powerful self-reflection question that can help you make decisions AND begin moving relationships in a different direction.
Sign up for my FREE masterclass:
“3 Secrets to Repair Your Family Relationships”
June 30, 4:00-5:00 MT
Full Transcript
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Tina Gosney
Welcome, you’re listening to Parenting Through the Detour Episode 53. Do I like the person I being in this relationship? A question to ask yourself.
Howard W Hunter said, “Your detours and disappointments are the straight and narrow way back to him.” Well, how are your detours going? Does it feel like everything’s gone wrong and you don’t know what to do now. I’m Tina Gosney, a life and relationship coach for LDS parents, with adult children. And I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I’m going to help you find your footing again through those detours and disappointments. And when you find your strength, and your courage to navigate your own detours, you’re going to begin helping your family through theirs as well.
Welcome back to the podcast. I am so glad you’re here today. This we’re getting towards the end of June, summer seems like it’s finally started where I live. I don’t know about you. But we’ve been waiting for quite a while for some warm weather and we finally have gotten it. I’m super excited.
I want to let you know that I’m offering another free masterclass on June 30, 4pm, mountain time, three secrets to repair your family relationships, there’s a link to register in the show notes.
So go there right now and get registered. And if you’re struggling in a family relationship, right now, I want you to come and I want you to get some free help. I’m going to talk about the three things that my clients, when I use these with my clients, they make the most progress with these three things that I’m going to share with you. And these are the three things that move them further along in their relationships than any other thing.
So these are super important things I’m going to share with you. I’m only offering this class a handful of times this summer, make sure you get registered in the you don’t miss out, go right now to the show notes and get registered for that class. It’s going to be one hour, that’s all and it’s going to be one hour of your time that was well spent. So go and get registered for that masterclass.
Now, one of the most basic human needs that we have all of us have is that of self determination. We want to make our own choices. And we want to determine for ourselves who we are and what our lives will what they look like, the what the direction that we go. We don’t want anyone else to do this. For us. This is actually a God given gift to us. Although sometimes it doesn’t always feel like that. You can see this show up really early in childhood, like the two year old who wants to buckle their own seat belts and gets upset when you try to help them.
Or maybe they want to put on their own shoes, or they’re trying to feed them, you know, the one year old that’s trying to feed themselves and they just even though they’re not doing very well, they want to do it themselves. They want to be in charge of their own life. Maybe you see the 14 year old who all of a sudden wants to change the way that they look. They want to maybe have new different style of clothes and experiment with their clothes or their hairstyle or maybe some they’re trying experimenting with makeup, but they just want to find out who they are.
You can see this happening later in life too. It’s not just children. 40 year olds resist their parents veiled criticism, or maybe their spouse is veiled criticism of what they are doing with their lives, maybe the things that they’re eating, or how they’re spending their time, or the choices that they’re making in their parenting or in their career. So we see this all the time. We see people resisting other people telling them what to do.
Now I coach couples, I coach parents, I coach people in family relationships. I’m a Family Relationship Coach.
And so I get to hear all the time, what is happening in family relationships. I get to hear my clients tell me all about the other people in their lives all about their families, their spouses, their parents, their children, their siblings, and extended families. I get to hear what these people say what they do, what they didn’t do, what they wish the other person would do. And how they want the other person to be different. Now they’re not telling hear these things, because they’re happy with it, they’re telling me these things because they’re very upset about it.
And they want help to try to get past these things. And I can see, so often the pain that are in my clients eyes and in their voice in their body language, I can see how much pain they’re carrying, through not having the family relationships be the way that they want them to be. And I also see how many things they are doing to try to get the other person to change.
My clients often don’t even know what they’re doing. They are trying to get their this person to change in ways that they just think they’re being helpful. And they just think they’re being kind and showing them what they need to do differently. But when we do this, when we try to change someone else, we are violating their sense of self determination. Think of that two year old that’s rebelling that saying, I don’t want you telling me what to do, I don’t want you helping me.
But think of that showing up maybe as an adult. And when somebody else tries to tell us what to do, and how to live our lives, it’s very natural for us, to shut them out to view them as an enemy in our own lives. And we don’t want to do this to our family members. So we need to be very careful about how we try to get someone else to change. Because when we are trying to get them to change, we are violating their sense of self determination.
And the truth is you don’t have any control over what someone else does. What they don’t do, what they say or what they don’t say, even the kind of person they are, you don’t have any control over that. And when you are very hurt, very frustrated, maybe disillusioned or angry. This is what you naturally want to do. You want to change the other person, you want to make them different because you’re looking at them saying if they would just be different than I would not be hurt, frustrated, disillusioned or angry. But you have no control over this.
You don’t have any control over the decisions that somebody else makes in their life. Even if it seems like you do. You really don’t. So what do you have control over? This is a really important thing to remember. The thing that you have control over is the person that you are being in the relationship. Now, if you haven’t listened to this episode actually did two episodes with Jennifer Finlayson five, they were dropped last fall.
And if you’re not familiar with Jennifer Finlayson five, she is amazing. I want you to go listen to her podcast, she has a couple of different podcasts. And the two episodes that I did with her are in my top five downloaded episodes, because she has so many great things to say. But she did recently say this, she said it’s always uncomfortable to wake up to who you are, and see yourself differently than you believe yourself to be. As difficult as it is. It’s where all the possibility lies.
This quote alone is what I’m going to be talking about. In this podcast. It’s uncomfortable to wake up to see ourselves differently than we thought we were. But as difficult as that is, that’s where our possibility lies. And when we think that we don’t have the ability to change anything, we stop trying, we become a victim of the other person. And and it’s not a good place to put yourself as a victim of a fellow family member. And you’re going to see what another person needs to do. And you might see it as your job to help them change.
This is going to show up with control and manipulation. It might it might show up in the name of service, or I’m just trying to help you so that you can see how you can be better. But anything other than I love you just the way you are and you don’t need to change for me to love you. Is conditional love. Doesn’t mean that you agree with everything that they say or they do or that you say yes to everything or that you’re not allowed to have an opinion. But it does mean that none of that is based on whether or not you love that person just as they are.
Maybe one of the most hardest things to do is to look at ourselves and challenge who we think we are. But when we truly look at ourselves and we get real that’s actually when we start to feel terrible but Often feeling terrible is a sign that we’re growing. So you wish that you could grow in a different way. Besides feeling terrible. I so often wish that that was a possibility. But I’m so often also often reminded that if it felt good to grow, more people would be doing it.
Because growth is so painful that most people just close themselves off to it. And so most people, because they’re doing that are resisting growth. And that’s why we like to point our fingers at someone else and tell them to change. Because looking at ourselves, and the way that we need to change is so painful. It challenges our ego. And our ego is that part of our brain that tells us who we are. And it fiercely protects that view of ourselves.
Now, it likes to tell us and just reinforce our favorite view of ourselves, and our favorite view of our life. It’s very, very painful to challenge that story in the ego. It’s one of the most painful processes that you can go through on this earth. But it’s actually what we’re asked to do consistently, through our relationships and our experiences. Because the people we’ve been given in our lives are there to challenge us. Our family relationships are there to go through difficulty, through challenges through sometimes heartbreak and heart ache.
And when we go through those things, that’s an opportunity to grow. And so often it feels terrible and sad and heartbreaking. But when we repair those relationships, when they go through those challenges, those relationships get to move to another level. And we get to grow and move to another level as a human being. Now, if we don’t challenge that ego, if we choose to hold on so tightly to the story of who we are, and how we think our life is supposed to go and how the people in our life are supposed to be, then our relationships will stay painfully stuck right where they are.
But if you want to get past the surface level relationship, you must be willing to open yourself up to asking yourself some hard questions, and challenging yourself challenging that ego story challenging that favorite view of yourself and who you think you are. Because here’s the truth, it doesn’t matter what the other person does, and what they don’t do. You are always the one who dictates what you will do. So here’s a couple of questions to ask yourself.
Do I like the person that I’m being in this relationship? That question alone is super powerful. And it drives introspection. You can also turn that question around and you can say, what would it be like to be in a relationship with me? And even to look at it in a more narrow view, look at maybe an interaction that you’ve had with a family member? What would have what would it have been like to be on the other side of that conversation? The other side of that situation?
Do I like the way that I was showing up? And would I have liked someone to show up that way with me? Such good questions to ask yourself. Now, I do want to add a couple of disclaimers here. But this does not mean that you accept things into your life that are harmful spiritually, emotionally, physically. It doesn’t mean that you tell other people that they need to look at themselves and work on themselves. That’s the equivalent of using the phrase.
It’s your choice to be offended against someone else when it was really meant to be an introspective statement, and not used as a weapon against other people in order to justify and rationalize using anything that you want. But asking yourself, do I like the person that I being in this relationship is a question to ask yourself for you to do self reflection on you. And that’s it. And as you do this self reflection, you might find that you need to put some boundaries into place. Maybe you haven’t spoken up when you needed to speak up, maybe you’ve let someone else treat you back treat you badly and you haven’t spoken up about it.
Maybe you see ways that you were self centered and not listening to what another person was trying to tell you. Maybe you see how you got defensive when someone was trying to share something with you. How you have contributed to a situation as it is right now. Even if your part was only 5%, acknowledge that 5% and take responsibility for it. You don’t have to take responsibility for the 95%. But own what’s yours own the 5%. Or maybe you can see how you are conditionally loving another person, by not accepting them as they are right now, today, no changes.
If you haven’t listened to Episode 48, conditional versus unconditional love, I highly urge you to go and listen to that. Because so much of what we deal with in our relationships is another person trying to get unconditional love. And I talk about the difference between conditional and unconditional love, and how most of us have never experienced unconditional love.
So we don’t even know how to get it or how to give it. And we’re drowning and just taking everyone else down with us. But when you truly learn to unconditionally love another person, and they feel safe, to be them just as they are, they also feel safe to begin looking at themselves, and doing this work. And when you love someone else, just as they are you won’t need to tell them to change, they start to begin to see those things all on their own without you pointing those things out to them. If you truly want to have influence on someone, love them, just as they are today.
Don’t criticize, don’t judge, just love.
Because love works wonders. And that’s why it’s the key word and the key ingredient to both the first and second greatest commandments. Now, you are going to be tempted to only see your side of a situation, you will not want to look at your contribution to the situation if you don’t like what’s happening. Because your brain loves to be right. You love to be right. I love to be right. The other person that you’re having trouble with, they also love to be right.
Because humans love to be right. It’s just something that our brains are programmed to do. They’re programmed to think that we are right, which is another reason why asking yourself these questions is really difficult. It’s really hard and challenging your story about who you believe you are, and the way that you think your life is going to go. Or that it should be going. That’s another reason why this is so hard. And you’re going to be tempted to not be honest with yourself about what you’re doing, because you won’t be able to see it.
Your brain is going to filter out the things that don’t support your story, your ego and the way that you want to see yourself. Challenging, the ego is very painful. How many times have I said this on this podcast today, we don’t like pain, challenging, our ego is a very painful. But you know, one of the brain’s most primary jobs is to avoid pain. So of course, you will not want to see what you’re doing to contribute to a situation. Because it’s the equivalent of being inside a jar.
You can’t read a label, when you’re inside a jar. It is very difficult to see yourself and how other people are perceiving you and how you are showing up in relationship. When that’s outside the jar and you’re inside the jar. Coaching can help coaching helps you see things you literally can’t see. And that’s just not that’s not just the negative, that’s the positive.
I can’t tell you how many times I point out such to me that are such amazingly positive things that my clients are doing, that they have not even seen. And sometimes I get to show them how they’re creating the very pain that they’re telling me somebody else is creating. But coaching can do this for you. It offers you a new and a different perspective. Because someone else outside the jar can help you see what the label says.
And when you start to view yourself differently, when you start to view your life differently and your relationships differently. You start to get different results in your life. Because our lives are determined by the way that we think about ourselves, and about our situations and about other people. But when you’re so stuck inside a jar, needing to know what the label says, but you can’t read it. You need someone else to help you with that.
Now coaching is very challenging, it can be extremely uncomfortable, because it challenges the ego and your life’s perspective of who you are and how you fit into the world and into your relationships. But another thing that it does, by opening yourself up to that extremely uncomfortable challenge is that it helps you grow exponentially in a short amount of time.
Sometimes you may have been struggling with something for years, maybe decades, and in just a few short months, you’re able to grow past that from coaching. Now, again, in the words of Jennifer Finlayson five, it’s always uncomfortable to wake up to who you are, and see yourself differently than you believe yourself to be. As difficult as it is, it’s where all the possibility lies. So we want you to ask yourself, Do I like the person that I’m being in this relationship?
Or what would it be like to be in a relationship with me? Take a look at yourself and be honest. Do you like the way that you’re showing up? Maybe you have some work to do. Here’s a hint. Everyone has some work to do. If you think that you don’t, you should ask your family what you have to work on. This is super hard to open yourself up to letting them weigh in on how they see you.
But if you let them know that you want their honest feedback, and that it’s okay to tell you, you’ll begin to see yourself through the lens of them. And that can be very eye opening. It will not be painless, I promise. But it will be eye opening. And then you can start to see where your work is.
If this is something that you are looking at and wondering how can I do this for myself? How is this going to work for me? Then I want you to sign up for my free masterclass on June 30 4pm. Mountain Time three secrets to begin repairing your family relationships.
There’s a link in the show notes. So go get registered right now. If you can’t make it live, there’s no worries because there will be a replay that is sent out within 24 hours after the class is over. So I want you to go and get registered for that class right now. I will see you there on June 30.
And I want you to remember, your detours and disappointments do not define you and they do not define your family. I’ll see you next week.
