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22. Empowerment Through Delight



Teacher smiling in a classroom

ABOUT THE PODCAST:

Have you ever thought about how your mood can empower or disempower you?  How it can make things easier or more difficult to handle? In this episode of the Empowered Educator Mom podcast, we explore four specific things you can focus on to improve your mood so you can be more empowered to handle life’s challenges.


We’ll dig into why feelings matter, why you actually need some negativity in your life, and how you can impact your moods through your thoughts. You’ll walk away with strategies you can use right away to infuse your life with more delight, fun, humor, and liking.


Delight can be a powerful addition to your empowerment toolkit—one that helps you meet tough moments with calm, patience, lightheartedness, and laughter.  It can change the way you experience the highs and lows of daily life and fuel you to keep showing up as the educator mom you want to be.


WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

  • Why trying to eliminate pain can backfire (and what to do instead)

  • Why emotions come from thoughts, not circumstances – and how that affects empowerment

  • Four mood-shifting practices – delight, fun, humor, and liking – and how to incorporate more of them into your life

  • Why some moms have trouble identifying what’s fun to them – and what to do if that’s you

  • Why it’s empowering to like more, dislike less, and sometimes have no opinion


LINKS AND RESOURCES:


HAVE A COMMENT OR QUESTION?





SEE FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever thought about how your mood can empower or disempower you?  How it can make things easier or more difficult to handle?


I’d like you to imagine a very common scenario.  You’ve had a long day at work dealing with student behavior issues and lessons that didn’t go as planned.  You’re frustrated, tired, and a little grumpy as you head to pick up your kids and go home.  You continue ruminating about your day as you drive to get your kids, and you snap at them to “hurry up!” as they climb into the car.  Later, when you’re in your kitchen making dinner, you suddenly tune in to what your kids are saying upstairs.  You hear one child say to the other, “I know how we can get these downstairs faster,” and then you hear a loud crash of lego blocks tumbling down the stairs.  How would you react?


Now, imagine a similar scenario with a similarly challenging day at work, but instead of getting frustrated about the behavior issues and lessons gone awry, you laugh about the absurdity of all of it.  Maybe not in front of your students, but at least to yourself at the end of the day.  You’re not thrilled with how things turned out, but you don’t fixate on it.  You listen to some upbeat music as you drive to get your kids, and as they’re climbing into the car, you ask them about their craziest or funniest experiences that day.  Later, when you’re in your kitchen making dinner, you suddenly tune in to what your kids are saying upstairs.  You hear one child say to the other, “I know how we can get these downstairs faster,” and then you hear a loud crash of lego blocks tumbling down the stairs.  Now how would you react?


If you’re like me, you would’ve reacted very differently in those two situations.  Being grumpy and frustrated in the first scenario probably would’ve led me to yelling at my kids when I heard the legos tumbling down the stairs, but being calmer and more upbeat in the second scenario would’ve probably led to me laughing.  I might’ve been a little frustrated about the mess, but I would’ve been much less so than in the first scenario.


In today’s episode, we’re going to continue this theme and talk about how mood can be a really powerful empowerment tool.  We’re going to talk about four specific things you can focus on to enhance and improve your mood so you can be more empowered to handle whatever life throws your way.


Ready?  Let’s get into it.


Are you ready to feel more empowered and less overwhelmed at home and in the classroom?  I’m Keri Martinez, and I’m a wife, mother, and educator- turned-life coach with more than 25 years experience.  I’m here to offer you strategies, tips, and tools to help you increase your personal power so you can stop stressing and obsessing, and start enjoying your work and family more.  I know that when you feel better, you do better.  But it can seem darn near impossible to feel better when you’re handling two of the most demanding jobs on the planet – teacher and mom.  Typical PD sessions, conference workshops, and self-help books on work-life balance aren’t cutting it, so It’s time for a different approach.  Welcome to the Empowered Educator Mom Podcast.


Hello everybody.  Welcome or welcome back to the podcast.


I am feeling very inspired about this topic today!  I’ve been thinking about and playing around with this idea for a while, and for about the past six to eight months, I’ve really focused on doing the things I’m going to share with you today.  I’ve been running my own mini research study on my life, and I can definitively say that these things have helped me, have empowered me to better handle challenges in my life.  I’ve also seen these ideas help clients, so I am very confident they can help other educator moms, as well.


Before we jump in, I want to address a potential elephant in the room.  Many times when someone is talking online about being positive or thinking positive or intentionally choosing to be happy, someone brings up toxic positivity.  And I think that’s totally valid.  I don’t think the advice to “just think happy thoughts” is particularly helpful, and I am not encouraging that.  I’m not suggesting you ignore or suppress negative thoughts and feelings, and I’m not suggesting you gaslight yourself (or let anyone else gaslight you) into feeling happy about something you think is negative.  That would mean feeling happy about things like human trafficking and political corruption and abuse and cancer, and I don’t think that’s at all appropriate or useful.


So, please don’t tell yourself you need to or should be happy all the time.  That is not normal or healthy.  Life is always and always has been a mix of good and bad, positive and negative, opposition in all things.  It’s 50/50 and we make it harder on ourselves to deal with the negative 50% when we tell ourselves it shouldn’t be there.


Buddhism holds that we increase our suffering when we resist it, and there is mounting evidence from the fields of behavioral science and neuroscience to support that.  On a recent podcast, behavioral scientist and Harvard professor Dr. Arthur Brooks said, “We have a problem philosophically in modern life [that’s] kind of the opposite of the hippie culture… In the 60s they used to say, ‘if it feels good, do it’... [and that caused a lot of people to mess] up their lives, taking a lot of drugs…”  The opposite of that – which is, ‘if it feels bad, make it stop’ – is equally bad, because when we think we need to eliminate pain, be it physical or psychological, we end up making it worse or creating all sorts of other problems.


Dr. Anna Lembke from Stanford University says our brains need a balance of positive and negative to function properly.  She says that trying to suppress or eliminate pain and painful experiences is a major cause of addiction.  It’s all fascinating stuff, and I’ll put links in the show notes if you want to go deeper.


OK.  Back to what I was saying.  Life will always be 50/50 – yes – and we don’t need to feel good and happy about everything.  That being said, we do have a lot more control and influence over our emotions, our moods, than we typically acknowledge, and we do ourselves a disservice when we don’t tap into that.


It’s a disservice because our feelings drive everything we do.  Feelings aren’t just woo woo fluff.  They drive what we say or don’t say to other people, how we react in different situations, how long we stick with things, whether we show up or hide, whether we laugh something off or yell, and so on.  They’re a pretty big deal and why I keep saying “when you feel better, you do better.”


I said earlier that we have a lot more control and influence over our emotions that we usually realize.  That does not mean we can control our emotions all the time.  Certain emotions are triggered automatically by our nervous system’s response to things happening in or around us.  These are hard-wired and not really possible to change.  And then there are other emotions that feel hard-wired because we’ve practiced them so many times, but they really aren’t.  These emotions are caused by our thoughts, and they can be changed.


Does that sound crazy to you that most of our emotions are caused by our thoughts?  Most of us weren’t taught that growing up, and we think our emotions come from what’s happening around us or to us.  Someone cuts us off in traffic, and that causes us to feel upset.  Students talk back or cuss us out, and that causes us to feel disrespected or angry.  Our kids don’t do their chores when we’ve asked them 37 times, and that causes us to feel irritated or exasperated.  Our husband forgets our birthday, and that causes us to feel hurt or sad.

It seems to us like the circumstances are causing our emotions, but I promise you, they are not.  It can’t be true that our emotions are caused by what’s happening around us or to us, because otherwise, everyone would have the same emotional response to the same stimulus.  Everyone would feel upset or angry when they’re cut off in traffic.  Everyone would feel disrespected when someone cusses them out.  Everyone would feel hurt when someone forgets their birthday.  But not everyone does.


Also, you would have the same emotional response to a given stimulus any time you encountered that stimulus, but that doesn’t happen either.  For example, the first time your child smeared food all over his face, you were probably amused.  The twenty-third time he did it, you were probably annoyed.  If the smearing of the food caused your emotion, you’d feel the same emotion regardless.  But you didn’t.  Because the first time you probably thought something like, “Awww, how cute!”  And the twenty-third time, you thought something like, “Not again!”


There’s a great line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet where Hamlet says, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (2.2.68-70).  Your husband forgetting your birthday is neutral – it isn’t good or bad – until you have a thought about it.  Same thing for a student cussing you out and someone cutting you off on the freeway and your kids not doing their chores.  None of those circumstances cause you to feel anything, but what you think about them definitely does.


If you recall the formula I shared in episode 19, the empowerment formula, empowerment equals choice times attention plus energy.  The attention in that formula refers to your thoughts, so empowerment comes in part from what you choose to think about or how you choose to think about something.  Let’s go back to the example of a student cussing you out.  I used to think outrage or shock were the only possible emotional responses to situations like that.  If you told me back then that I didn’t have to be upset when a child did that, I would’ve been totally confused.  I would’ve thought, “How could I be anything but upset?”


My husband, however, is a different story.  He was a high school principal for many years, and was cussed out a lot more than I ever was by students and sometimes parents.  He used to come home from work and tell me about it.  And he’d laugh while describing the situation.  The first few times he did that, I was so confused.  I couldn’t understand how he could find it funny.  I was outraged on his behalf, and I couldn’t understand why he wasn’t upset about what these people were calling him.  I finally asked him why he wasn’t upset, and he said, “Well, the first time they call me an M-F-er, I don’t like it. But when they say it 18 times, it just seems over-the-top ridiculous and I think, ‘OK, have you got anything else for me? Can we move on now?’”  It’s not that he loved being cussed out, but he was able to think about it in a way that empowered him, that allowed him to stay calm and out of the drama.  His thoughts about the situation were different from mine, and that’s what produced the different emotions for us.

So you may have noticed that a lot of what I’m doing in these podcast episodes is offering you different thoughts, different ways to think about things.  Dr. Wayne Dyer used to say, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”  I’m offering you different ways to look at things so those things can change for you.  Not to say you should think about and look at them differently, but to show you that you could if you wanted to.  I don’t know if you should think differently or not – only you can decide that.


I find it helpful to think of thoughts like pieces of clothing – we can try on different ones and see how they fit.  People around you and online are offering you thoughts all the time.  Anytime someone shares a story or gives an opinion or tries to convince you of something, they’re offering you thoughts.  Your parents, your kids, your religious leaders, celebrities, your admin, fellow teachers, online health gurus, me on this podcast, and you to other people – we’re all offering thoughts.  Regardless of who the thoughts come from, you can try them on and see if they feel good to you, see if they feel right.  If they do, great!  But if not, you don’t need to take them on.  You’re free to return them to the rack, so to speak.


So, I know that was a big lead up to today’s discussion about empowerment through delight, but I wanted to give you that background so you’d better understand why and how this information can be so impactful.


When you feel better, you do better, so let’s talk now about four things you can focus on to feel better so you can be more empowered to handle the challenges of your life.  I’m putting these four things under the big umbrella of “delight” but they’re each slightly different.  The four things are delight, fun, humor, and liking.  So let’s just go through them in order.


First, delight.  What kinds of things delight you?  What brings delight into your life?  The dictionary defines delight as something that brings pleasure, satisfaction, gratification, or joy.  Things that delight me tend to be little things, things that usually don’t cost a lot like how it feels to get into bed on clean sheet day; the smell of laundry detergent or fabric softener when I’m walking around my neighborhood; the smell of rain, pine trees or freshly cut grass; vacuum lines in my carpet; how my house smells when I bake bread or cinnamon rolls; the feel of certain clothes and super soft blankets on my skin; pictures of my kids when they were little; the sound of my kids laughing and talking together; hearing them get crazy competitive when they’re playing Mario Kart; feeling the sun on my skin while laying on our trampoline; the sound of water in nature; t-shirts with snarky lines from Jane Austen novels on them; and watching the 1995 BBC version of Pride and Prejudice … for the hundred and whatever time.  Thinking about and experiencing those things makes me smile and brings a lightness to my spirit.  They delight me.


In my early days of life coaching, I worked with different women on losing weight, and one of the things that typically came up for them as they started changing their eating habits was a loss of delight from food.  If you’ve ever tried to lose weight by restricting certain kinds of foods, you’ve probably experienced this, yourself.  You used to get joy from eating certain foods – maybe cookies or doughnuts or chips – and when you cut those out, you lose that joy.  And it feels kind of terrible for a while.  But, if you stick with it, after about two, maybe three weeks, the terrible feeling, the sense of extreme deprivation, starts to lessen.  It was at that point that I’d start asking them to notice things they now enjoyed or that brought delight that they hadn’t noticed before.  Prior to that point, the food had been so much of a focus that it had blocked their awareness of these things.  They’d been too focused on using food to make themselves feel better that they didn’t notice these other things before.  And when that initial deprivation started to lessen, though, they’d be able to notice little delights more easily, and I’d encourage them to start making a list of them.


I offer you that same advice.  Start looking for things that delight you.  Start noticing what you enjoy, what makes you smile, what lights you up and gives you a sense of gratification.  If you’re not used to doing this, to looking for these things, it might be slow going at first, but I promise the more you look for things to be delighted in, the more you will find.  Then, write them down or curate them as you go.  Create a note on your phone, make a delight list in your journal, or write things on post-it notes on your bathroom mirror.  Take pictures on your phone of things that delight you and save them in a delight album.  Make a collection of memes or jokes or reels that delight you.  Make a playlist of music that delights you.  Make a collection of books or movies or TV shows that delight you.  Make a capsule wardrobe of clothes you delight to wear, a collection of recipes you delight to cook, or hobbies or places to visit or people you delight spending time with.  There are so many ways you can start noticing and incorporating delight into your life.  So pick one or two that sound fun and start there.


OK. The next topic actually is fun.  What is fun for you, and how can you incorporate more of that in your life?  Something interesting I notice about this topic with moms in the thick of raising kids is that they often can’t identify what’s fun to them.  They have a hard time answering the question “what is fun for you?”  And that’s usually because they’re so focused on taking care of their kids, attending to their kids’ needs, that they kind of forget about this part of themself.  Or they feel so stressed and overwhelmed that the only things that sound fun are sleep, Netflix, and a gallon of ice cream.  Anything else sounds like too much work to be fun.


If that sounds like you, I want to offer a few suggestions.  First, please, please, please consider prioritizing fun for yourself.  As educators, we know the value of incorporating fun into lessons.  There is a lot of research on gamification in learning and how fun eases students’ anxiety and makes learning stickier.  Fun helps regulate our nervous system, it puts our brains in a more relaxed and receptive state, and it helps us feel better.  If it seems too selfish to prioritize fun for yourself, remember that when we feel better, we do better, so you having fun will help you do better as a mom and educator.  But more importantly, you deserve it!  Your wellbeing and enjoyment of life are just as important as anyone else’s.


Second, journal about what is fun to you.  If nothing comes to mind, start by listing things you used to find fun as a child, teenager, or younger adult.  These don’t need to be big things like visiting amusement parks or traveling to other countries, although you could include those.  Look for little things you find fun.  Maybe it’s dance parties in your bathroom, playing music or listening to podcasts while you cook dinner, sharing funny reels or memes with your sister, playing board games, hosting movie nights, crafting, going on moonlight or sunrise walks, or answering the phone in some crazy way.  It doesn’t have to be fun for anyone else.  Just what do you find fun?


Third, when you’re doing things throughout your day, particularly things you find tedious or challenging, ask yourself how you can make it a little more fun.  Again, we’re not looking for amusement park-level fun, just a way to up the fun factor a bit.


Lastly, this is a bit of a mindset hack, and that is to tell yourself, “I bring the fun.”  Because you absolutely can.  You don’t need to wait for someone else to make something fun, or hope that someone else will.  You can bring the fun – to staff meetings, household chores, exercise, meal prep, lesson planning, potty training, carpooling, whatever.  Ask yourself how you can make it a little more fun, and then you bring the fun.


I’ll share a quick example with you related to staff meetings.  You may or may not find this fun, but hopefully it’ll get your creative juices flowing.  Decide on a secret word – ideally with a few other people like some teacher buddies or maybe a grade-level team – and then see how many times you can incorporate that word or interject it into the staff meeting.  If you’re presenting during the staff meeting, you can work it into your presentation.  If you’re not presenting, you can work it into comments or questions or feedback.  And the weirder the word the better – don’t make it something that would be a natural part of an education conversation.


Now that I think about it, that suggestion could even work for the next topic which is humor, because it can be pretty hilarious to try to incorporate words like nocturnal and flagellation and uppity into a staff meeting conversation.  You end up getting metaphors and analogies that can be pretty funny.  Anyway, for humor, start thinking about how you can incorporate more humor into your life, into your classroom, and into your home.  Start noticing and collecting things you find funny – funny pictures, jokes, movies, songs, memes, and so on.

I love the music video for Weird Al Yankovic’s song “White and Nerdy.”  I laugh every time I watch it because it is just so goofy!  The lyrics are genius, the goofy ways Weird Al dresses and acts throughout the video are great, and the dance scene with Donny Osmond is hysterical!  I also love collecting and making funny memes that I can use in presentations or send to friends and family.


In episode 19, I talked about supporting my husband through his health trials, and I mentioned that I wanted to try to bring some humor to our situation.  Sometimes this looks like me reading goofy dad jokes or knock-knock jokes to him as he paces the floor.  Sometimes it looks like the two of us making jokes about the side effects of the medication he’s on or the number of appointments he has.  Not everybody finds these jokes funny, but that’s OK.  The humor is for us to help us cope.  In fact, there have been a couple of times we’ve laughed at things in the doctor’s office and the doctor has just looked at us, confused.  But my point is the doctor doesn’t need to find these things funny.  We do, and we’ve found laughter very healing.  So I’m encouraging you to be intentional about finding humor in your own life – particularly challenging parts of your life.  If you look for it, you’ll find it.


Before I move on to the last topic, I just want to qualify that I’m not talking about humor at other people’s expense or humor that’s profane or inappropriate.  Humor around other people can be tricky because not everyone finds the same things funny, right?  So it is wise to take care when incorporating humor into public presentations and lessons.  That said, what I’m recommending to you about noticing and collecting funny things is for your benefit, to lift your spirit, to elevate your mood.  Other people don’t need to find your collection funny – just you do.


OK.  The last topic is liking, and I’m going to break this down three ways – liking more, disliking less, and having no opinion sometimes.  I want to encourage you to like more things, dislike fewer things, and sometimes have no opinion.  I think it was a couple of years ago when I first heard my coach talking about liking more and I remember her saying that liking feels good.  Think about something or someone you like – a food, a friend, a vacation spot, a favorite book, a hobby, or whatever.  How do you feel when you think about those things?  You probably feel pretty good.  Thinking “I like that restaurant” or “I like that movie” makes you feel a little joy, maybe delight or happiness, right?  Liking feels good.  So why not try to like more things?


Did you know you can just decide to like something, even without experiencing it, even if it’s not perfect?  You can decide before walking into a PD session that you’re going to like it and get something out of it.  You can decide before meeting a new colleague or boss that you’re going to like them.  You can decide before taking a vacation that you’re going to like the experience.  You can decide before starting to declutter the garage that you’re going to like the process.  I know that might sound odd, but you’ve probably already done this in your life, maybe multiple times without even realizing it.  For example, think about your children.  I am willing to bet you decided before they were born that you loved them, you were going to love them.  You probably were not thinking, “Hmm, I’m not sure about this kid.  I’m going to have to wait and see if they live up to my expectations before I decide if I love them.”  No!  And if you think about it, you’ll probably realize you’ve pre-decided to like other things in your life, as well.


The second option - disliking less - is the flipside of the first option.  Liking feels good, and disliking feels bad, right? So can you be intentional about disliking fewer things?  There’s a particular model of car that one of my sons hates, and every time we see one of those cars, he kind of rages about how much he hates that car.  My question to him is always, “Why do you care so much?  You’re not driving the car, you don’t own it, why do you care so much about a car that’s not even yours?”


You don’t need to decide to like everything, of course, but are there things you could decide to dislike less, for your own sake?  Think about this not just in terms of material things but also things like other people’s beliefs, political or religious figures, and policies and regulations.  You don’t need to agree with other people's beliefs, you don’t need to support every political or religious figure, and you don’t need to love every policy and procedure, but that also doesn’t mean you need to hate them, either.  Disliking and hating deplete your energy. They don’t feel good.  But liking does the opposite.  Liking is energizing and does feel good.  You can test this right now.  Think about something you like and notice how you feel.  Now think about something you don’t like or that you hate, and notice how you feel.  Which feels better?


The last option - having no opinion - comes from Stoic philosophy.  Marcus Aurelius said, “It is not men’s acts which disturb us … but it is our own opinions which disturb us,” (Meditations, 11.30) and “it is in our power to have no opinion about a thing” (Meditations, 6.52).  If something is not of real consequence for you or it is not in your control, consider having no opinion about it.  You don’t have to have an opinion of your superintendent or your grade level assignment.  You don’t need to have an opinion about the stock market or inflation.  You don’t have to have an opinion about your child’s cross country schedule or his teacher.  You can choose to have no opinion.


OK.  We covered a lot of ground in this episode, so feel free to rewind and listen again if you need to.


Before I sign off I want to ask, what’s one thing you want to implement from this episode or share with another educator mom?  Of the four emotion-boosting areas we covered – delight, fun, humor, and liking – which one feels the most inspiring for you to work on?  Text me through the link in the show notes or DM me on Instagram @kerimartinezcoaching, and I’ll be happy to respond.


Thanks for listening to this episode of the Empowered Educator Mom podcast!  If you loved the episode and want even more help from me, be sure to grab my free “3 Secrets to Less Stress as an Educator Mom.”  I wish someone would’ve shared these with me early in my motherhood and education journey because they would have saved me from a lot of stress and anxiety.  So if you desperately want to be less stressed and overwhelmed, you need these secrets.  They are not things you’ve heard before, and even better, you can implement them right away to start feeling better right away.  I know they can help you like they helped me, so click the link in the show notes and discover them for yourself.


Have an amazing week everyone, and I’ll talk to you soon.




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