Ep #124: Your Future is Your Property

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, episode 124, Your Future Is Your Property.

Welcome to The Widowed Mom Podcast, the only podcast that offers a proven process to help you work through your grief, to grow, evolve, and create a future you can truly look forward to. Here’s your host, Master Certified life coach, grief expert, widow, and mom, Krista St-Germain.

Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. What if you decided to believe that your future was your property?

In this episode, I’m gonna attempt to sell you on this belief. And I’m gonna talk to you about what’s possible if you truly lean into this way of thinking, and also help you understand why you might resist it. Then, you can decide if you wanna choose this belief for yourself. All right?

Quick little update in my world before we jump in. So, my daughter’s 18^th birthday is coming up and I’m getting ready to have a little party for her.

I’ve also noticed—I’m still learning how to parent as we go, even though my daughter’s almost 18… But I’ve noticed that—and others have told me that this is the case, so it’s not just my observation—that oftentimes, before the child gets ready to kind of leave the nest or starts imagining themselves leaving the nest, that can be a little bit of a rough patch where they start experiencing a lot of self-doubt and just that kind of “ick” that comes along with the idea that you’re gonna have to grow up and you don’t really know what that’s gonna look like for you.

And so, that’s kind of what we’re dealing with in my house right now, is figuring that all out together. So, not easy. Parenting challenges keep coming. If you’re having parenting challenges, I see you. I feel you. I hear you. I am you. But we’re still going, right? We’re still going.

Okay. Let’s just jump into the episode because I wanna talk about it. So, your future is your property. Simply put, I really do believe that it serves us to think of our future as our property. So, just like you own your own television or you own your own computer, you own your future, even after the death of your partner.

And as a sidenote, I also believe that our past is our property. But we’ll save that for another episode, because I really want to focus on our future here.

So, why am I encouraging you to choose this belief? Why do I want to sell you on it? You know, if you’ve been listening to me for any length of time, that one of my greatest pet peeves, like fingernails on a chalkboard, is the notion that we as widows have to settle for a new normal that we didn’t ask for.

The idea that the death of our partner means that we are resigned to some sort of substandard life. That what has happened means our best days are behind us instead of in front of us. Right? That’s some crap. It’s just some crap. And I can’t.

Post-traumatic growth tells us that we can use any traumatic life experience to create a life that’s actually more of what we want instead of less. We can literally go on to love life even more than we did before, if we want to.

So, not only does this whole “resign ourselves to a new normal” thing make me crazy, but I know that so much more is possible for us. So, that’s where this is coming from. Right?

And in order to do that—in order to go on and love life—we need to feel empowered. We need to feel capable. We need to feel that it’s possible, right? We need to know how to light ourselves up. We need to believe that not only is it okay to dream again and to be happy again—because some of us struggle with that, which is another conversation—but we also have to believe that the goals that we want and the dreams that we have are within our reach. That we’re powerful enough to make them happen.

And I also believe that if we’re given a dream, then we’ve also been given what it takes to breathe that dream into existence. But in order to do that, we need to believe that we can. And the self-coaching model that I teach gives us a framework for exactly why that matters—why we have to believe that we can.

If we look at any result that we’ve created for ourselves, we’ll see that we created that result with our actions. And the reason we took those particular actions was because of how we felt. Because as humans, we’re driven by emotion. And we created how we felt with what we thought.

And all of those things—our thoughts, our feelings, our actions—are things we can choose for ourselves. And when we know how to do that and when we do that consistently, that’s when we begin to see that we can create a new result that we want for ourselves. That’s when we begin to see that we are more powerful than we’ve been thinking and that we literally own our future.

So, let me give you an example. One of my Mom Goes On Masters members decided to take her kids out of school and homeschool them while they travel around the world for a year. Like, can we just take a moment and clap for her? Because that’s big. Right? That just didn’t happen by accident.

This took action on her part. This took imperfect action on her part. This took her choosing to believe that she was capable of making that happen—that it was a worthy goal. Right? It took her being willing to be afraid. It took her choosing to feel committed and being willing to be afraid at the same time. Right?

It took a serious amount of managing her mind and using the self-coaching model to make this trip happen for her family. But she did it. She totally did it.

She chose to believe that her goal of this adventure for her family was worthy and possible. She also chose to feel the sadness of taking that big adventure without her husband. Right? None of it was easy for her.

Now, she knows I think she’s amazing. She is amazing. But she’s also not a special unicorn. She doesn’t have anything that you don’t have. She just learned to use the self-coaching model that I teach. She just learned to put what she wanted—that trip for her family—in the result line of the self-coaching model.

And she reverse-engineered that model so that she knew how to think and feel and act so that she could create that result for her family. Right? She owned her ability to create what she wanted. And that’s what I’m talking about when I say that “our future is our property.”

Small sidenote: I’m not saying that everything in life that’s happened to you is a result that you created. And I think that’s important.

So, for instance, I’m not responsible for my husband’s death. I am responsible for where I parked my car on the side of the highway that day, but I did not put alcohol or meth in that driver’s system. I did not get behind the wheel of his car. Right? I am not responsible for the parts of my story that I can’t control.

But I always have the ability to choose my response to the parts I can’t control. And so do you. More on that in a minute.

But it’s important to me that you understand that what I’m talking about—the self-coaching model, and thoughts causing feelings, and feelings driving actions, and actions producing our results—that we aren’t using the idea of our ability to choose our response as a weapon against ourselves. We aren’t using the idea that we can create the results in our lives as a weapon. We’re not taking responsibility for things we actually didn’t do to ourselves.

So, no weaponizing. Okay? Because that’s not helpful. And that’s to miss the whole point of the tool.

So, I’m imagining that you’re probably asking, “How could it be that our future is our property when so many things are out of our control?” Right?

And it’s true. Many, many things are outside of our control. Right? I couldn’t control that that driver did put meth and alcohol in his system. I couldn’t control that he did get behind the wheel of that car. I couldn’t control that he didn’t stop. Right? I couldn’t control that.

And that happens in life over and over and over and over, not just with our spouses’ death. There are situations that happen to us that we can’t control. They just happen. All right? The cancer diagnosis. That thing that your mother said. The job that all of a sudden, you know—the company went bankrupt. There are just things that happen.

And I’ve talked about this in the podcast before, but I think it’s always worth remembering it, right? The equation: S + R = O.

S + R = O. It’s not my equation. It came from Stephen Covey. So, Stephen Covey’s framework here, which is, there are situations. Things that happen. Those are the things we can’t control. But the situation in and of itself isn’t what creates the outcome. It’s the combination of the situation and our response to the situation which we can choose that determine our outcome.

Right? So, it’s the things that happen plus the way we choose to respond that create the ultimate outcome. And so, that’s what I want you to focus on. And I think there’s a balance to be found here. There’s a balance.

And this is the goal. The balance is where we accept that there are things outside of our control, but where we’re also willing to experience the uncertainty that comes along with there being things outside of our control.

Where we stop trying to control every single thing out of fear. Right? Where we’re no longer buying the narrative that we can’t handle the emotions that come up when things are out of our control or the situations that are out of our control. We stop telling ourselves that we can’t handle it.

But we’re very clear on what we can control and what we can’t. And so, we stop spinning our wheels and our energy trying to control other people. And we stop spinning our wheels and our energy on being unwilling to feel. Right? Because being a human means highs and lows. And when we’re not willing to feel, especially the lows, we end up trying to control things that we can’t actually control.

So, that balance is not to confuse acceptance with resignation either. Right? It’s not to say—the balance is not to say, “I can control everything, or I can control nothing.” The balance is to say, “I know what I can control, and I know what I can’t. And I’m gonna focus my effort and energy on what I can control, which is my response to the situations in my life.”

And this balance is not a one-and-done thing. It’s not a place we reach. It’s not a destination. It’s a choice that we make over and over and over and over, many, many times a day. It’s like a continuous pivot where we notice ourselves trying to control something we can’t. Or we notice ourselves hooked, right, in a way that has us living out of alignment with our values.

And we pivot over and over and over. We open up to that feeling that we keep telling ourselves we don’t want to feel. We notice our desire to control the person or the thing that’s beyond our control. And we choose to detach from that. We come back to what we know we can control, which is our response.

We decide on purpose, “How do I want to think about this?” On purpose, “How do I want to feel about this?” On purpose, “How do I want to act here?” And it’s that continuous pivot—that continuous choice that we make—that enables us to not control every situation at all, but to create the results that we value by choosing our response to the situation.

So, your future is your property. This precious life that you’re living belongs to you. That thing in the future that you want—that thing that maybe you haven’t even given yourself permission to want—it’s available to you.

But it probably won’t just happen. It’s not gonna float down the river. Right? You’re gonna have to get out there and create it. You’re gonna have to be the one who takes the action that makes it happen. You’re gonna have to be the one who takes ownership over what she can control.

Because she’s wise enough to know the difference. Right? You have to be the one who chooses her own thoughts and her own feelings on purpose. Who keeps choosing to focus on her ability to respond to whatever the obstacle is that life throws at her. Right? You have to be the one who continues to believe—even when it’s hard—in the value of your vision for your life.

Because if you want those little whispers of what is possible for you—and I know you have them. You have little whispers of what is possible for your life and for your future. Even if right now, they’re drowned out by the intensity of grief, those whispers are still there.

And if you want to give them a chance to become real, then I want to encourage you to choose to believe that you have what is required to do that. That your future is your property. That you can put anything in the result line of the self-coaching model that you want and work backwards.

That’s our privilege as humans, if only we will lean into it and exercise it and take advantage of it. And so, that’s what I want for you. Not because you have to believe your future is your property. You totally don’t. But because I want you to have what you want in life. I want you to stop spinning your wheels, trying to control things you can’t, but also feeling empowered to create what it is that you want.

So, your future is your property. You own it. Go out there and create it. Okay? Okay. That’s what I have for you this week. Wherever you are, whatever you’ve got going on, I love you and you’ve got this.

If you like what you’ve been hearing on this podcast and want to create a future you can truly get excited about, even after the loss of your spouse, I invite you to join my Mom Goes On coaching program. It’s small group coaching just for widowed moms like you, where I’ll help you figure out what’s holding you back and give you the tools and support you need so you can move forward with confidence. Please don’t settle for a new normal that’s less than what you deserve.

Go to CoachingwithKrista.com and click “Work with Me” for details and next steps. I can’t wait to meet you.