118: 7 Signs You Might Need a Mindset Tweak

If you want to be able to answer questions like “do you have kids” with authenticity instead of awkwardness, you must shift your mindset.  It's not enough to just rehearse how you'll respond.  And if you're anything like I used to be, what you're rehearsing might feel more defensive and hurt than empowering. 

When I first realized that I wasn't going to have kids, I just wanted everyone to just stop asking me about kids, stop giving me advice and stop saying things I didn’t want to hear. But once I realized that it was my own mindset that needed a shift, I felt a huge sense of empowerment.  

In this solo episode, I'll share 7 signs that you might be stuck in a mindset that is blocking you from moving forward.  

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Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca

Transcript

If you want to be able to answer questions like, Do you have kids with authenticity instead of awkwardness? You actually have to shift your mindset. And maybe you already know this. When I first realized and started to accept that I was not going to be a mother, I did not know this. I wanted everyone to just stop asking about kids, stop giving me advice, saying things that I didn't want to hear. And if you listen to my last episode, you'll know that things don't just get easier on their own.

Time doesn't heal all wounds. You don't just wake up one day and suddenly have an easy answer to do you have kids? If that were true, then, well, wouldn't that have happened already? And how many other childless women have you noticed on Instagram or maybe an online Facebook support groups who are simply wishing that people would instead, just stop asking. Just stop seeing these things. In fact, that's exactly what I've seen people post, is parents, please stop asking people, please stop saying. And this tells me that they still just don't have a good way to respond, and they're probably right where I was a few years ago. So how do you actually shift your mindset and start doing something different. First, you can get clear on the mindset you're actually in, and in this episode, I'm gonna share exactly how I did that. So stay tuned if you wanna know the signs, welcome. Welcome back. This is Sherry Johnson, your host of The Awakening Earth podcast. This is the third in a summer series that I'm doing around how to answer the awkward questions and respond to the intensive comments, to that are sort of aimed at women who don't have kids. And if you want to actually be able to do that and do it with grace, you have to first shift your mindset. You can't just wait around for the answer to just come to mind. It won't unless something shifts within your mind. Otherwise your brain just goes through the same pattern, the same response, the same feeling of awkwardness afterwards, the same feeling of hurt. So if you want to change that pattern within your brain, you need to trigger something. You need to do something to shift it. So how do you do that? Well, one of the first things that I did is to actually go back to your own childhood. And I'm not a therapist. I'm but I do talk a lot about this, because what I've learned is that so much of my programming, my patterns, the things that I that I think can believe and do, started in my child, my childhood. So I'm actually going to use kids as an example to show you how this works, because most of us have some experience with kids and have watched this happen. So if you watch kids say fighting with their siblings, or maybe teenagers who would get in trouble for something, what is their first response when the parents are the adult, the teacher schools them or asks them, what happened? They blame the other person. They blame their sibling. They blame their friend who bought them into it. It's someone else's fault. She started he started it. There's this sense of blame. And I was totally here. This was my childhood. I had two sisters, and I remember actually using those words, well, she started it, this is her fault, and how we actually learned this. I don't think we're actually born with this. I think we learned this somehow. But that's a whole other story. That's a whole other conversation, the pattern that we actually follow, how we fall into those patterns. But this is one that actually stayed with me. I never wanted to take responsibility for my part in anything. I didn't know what I was doing this. I really I didn't realize that I was doing this. I thought, Well, I'm not, no, I don't blame people for my problems, but I wasn't taking responsibility either, and I wasn't taking responsibility for my part in things. I wasn't taking responsibility for the way that I felt, and that is actually victim mentality. And I don't say that with judgment. This is where I was, and maybe you are not, and that's amazing. If you're not. I'm saying this with compassion, because it's actually really hard to get into this, especially when we use words in our world, we constantly say things like, I'm a survivor of but that thing of whatever it is, is always there. And the more we say I'm a survivor, it's actually not that empowering. It actually keeps us identifying with that thing. So I'm going to come back to that in a minute. But I was deeply programmed somehow as a child to stay in that victim mentality, to stay in blame. And I noticed at first at work when I was in my early 30s, and I had two employees working for me at the time, and one of them was always taking responsibility. If anything ever went wrong, she would say, oh, gosh, I'm sorry. I could have done this differently. I could have done that. She was always looking at herself and what what her responsibility was. And the other employee was actually quite the opposite, and continuously blaming. And it was really hard to coach that person, to manage that person, because they would never take responsibility for anything, so they never actually learned anything. And it was so because it was so blatantly obvious how easy things were for the first employee, who was always taking responsibility. Relationships came easily to her work. People helped her like it was just everything was easy for her at work, and it was so difficult for the other person, I started to realize, and it also made me realize how often I was doing that too, how often I was blaming and apparently I had a lot to unpack, because the lessons that I learned in my early 30s as a manager didn't translate to my situation all that easily as a childless Woman, by the time I got to my 40s. By the time I got to my 40s and was trying to accept my path as a childless woman, I was triggered by all the questions in the comments, the people who said, Oh, you're so lucky. You don't have kids. Or do you want to borrow one of mine? You can borrow my income. It hurt. I reacted mostly internally. Externally. I sort of chuckle. And then I would retreat inwards, and I would see, why would they say something like that? Was always my reaction, and that actually is blame. I know that's really hard to see, but it's it's blaming them for the way that I feel, and we can actually change. It wasn't easy for me to shift my mindset around this, but what I ultimately realized was that I was that I was giving my power away when I expected everyone else to tiptoe around my feelings. I was being the victim I had learned to be in childhood, waiting for everyone else to change, asking them to change, sometimes, and blaming them for asking questions, saying things that they didn't know were hurting me, but what really got me to change was this waking up, I suddenly realized that what I felt was that I was constantly playing this game of Whack a Mole. And I have used this analogy many times before, so if you heard me say it, and it didn't sink in, although I said again, and maybe it didn't sink in, I don't know, but it just resonates so so much for me. It didn't matter how many people I educated about what not to say to me or what not to do, there was always someone else. There was always another wool popping up that I had to back down.

Notice, I hope, you know, this game, but they play at fun fairs, we were kind of maybe still having to do a fun, very, very long time.
So, I'll let you say, you might not be in Victor mode, like I was. And if you're not, again, that's amazing. Congratulate yourself, because it's really hard not to be. When you've come through something that is as difficult as losing your dream -not realizing the way that you envision your life to look. 

But if you're not sure, maybe you're not sure that you're in this, if you're in this mindset or not, I'm going to share the signs. And this isn't looking back for me. It's in hindsight that I can look back and see what I was doing and how I was thinking.

1. So first thing, I was waiting for other people to change. I was trying to get them to change. I was trying to get them to notice me, to support me, to change, for me to act differently, for me to stop seeing those things. For me, it was all about like I wanted other people around me to change so that I didn't have to. And that is me just wanting to stay where I'm at, wanting to stay in my mindset and expecting everyone else to do things for me that is giving my power to them, because if they decide not to do that for me, then I can't change that. I can't do anything about that. So that's giving my power away. So that's number one, is waiting for other people to change, trying to get them to change. 

2. The second thing, I was unable to forgive other people for saying the wrong thing. And forgiveness is actually something that my mother is very good at, and it's one thing that I thought I was pretty good at. But looking back, the more times I retold a story, the more times I told retold a story, or even retold it to myself, more times I complained about something, repented about something that someone said, the more often I relived that. And if I had forgiven the person for saying what they did or doing what they did, I wouldn't have needed to retell that story. So if you're finding finding yourself continuing to tell more more people or to vent about something or to to replay a movie in your head about what somebody said to you, you probably haven't forgiven them. And forgiving them is not actually about condoning what they said or did. It's actually about your response to the pain and letting it go. Your own sense of power lies in your ability to forgive, more often than not, probably the person who said something to you has no idea that they did. If you didn't say anything to them, they walked away. They have no idea that you are angry with them and they avoided that they hurt you, so they're walking around continuing on with life. It's you that's holding the pain of that. So it's you that takes back your power when you forgive. So that's number two, is forgiveness. 

3. Number three, I went around thinking that everything is happening to me. People are doing things to me. Life is happening to me instead of for me. And this is something that I learned from Wayne Dyer. If you haven't heard Wayne Dyer, look him up. He has tons of books. This is something that he used to say. He used to say, this is happening for me, not to me. And when you shift that little thing, it can implement actually, when I actually sort of start to embody that, when I really looked at how can this be happening for me, it immediately gets your brain to start looking for the lesson, or the gift or the something positive in there that is actually for you, and that can be huge. So that's number three. It's happening for me. Can you say that number four, I felt like I must be the only one going through this. I felt I was so inwardly focused. This is at least the third one. This is happening to me, but I felt like it was happening to only me, and that is actually really a sign of victim mentality, because you're only seeing yourself instead of seeing those around you. And that's what I was saying, was just me. It's all about me and what I'm going through. And now that I actually shifted, that I can see, oh my gosh, there's so many other people actually, even just in my little world, not to mention my clients and followers and all of that that I've gained since learning how to deal with this. But even back then, once I really started to shift to outward focus, I could see there's actually all kinds of people in my life in this situation. I just didn't think about it in that way because the circumstances were slightly different, so shifting that view is something that I had to do, and noticing that I was in that sort of mindset was also telling me that I was a victim of mode.  

5.  number five, letting my circumstances define me. So in the beginning, I was telling myself that I was childless, not by choice. In fact, I wasn't even knowledge. I was saying child free, not by choices. I didn't know all the terminology, and I talked about this on other episodes, all around terminology, but that language by itself, just being a childless woman, not by choice this, it's telling it was telling me that I was, this was not my choice. I'm a victim of this. This is something that happened to me that alone, that language kept reinforcing that I was a victim of this, that I was this was not my choice of circumstances that happened to me. So letting go with that actually, maybe finding a new term, or just you can identify in a different way I talk. This is something I teach inside my program. It's not that easy to just shift that. So it's something that you kind of have to get to the underlying beliefs and and shifting that. So this is something that that I can get into in a short podcast episode. And I am trying to keep these fairly short. So let's get to number six.

6. Number six is self pity. So this, by itself, might actually be triggering for you, because  no one wants to be pitied. And I actually recorded a whole episode on pity. I will leave it in the show notes. I can't remember right now. So nobody wants to be pitied, nobody wants to feel that way. But what I found was, what I've noticed is that if you feel like you're being pitied, you're also probably pitying yourself. What you feel, what you see in the world, is actually a mirror for what's going on inside of you, and I was certainly pitying myself. I didn't consciously think that I was but I did think kind of these probably also weren't the words I was using inside my mind. But for me, I'm the only one who doesn't get to have kids. Everyone else gets to have what they want. Why wasn't it easy for me? Why didn't I get to have what I wanted? And those are words of self pity, and I was saying those on repeat in my head, so that's another sign that you might be in victim mode. 

7. And the last one being on the defensive. So if you're feeling like you're being attacked. So let's say you read an article and it mentions women without kids are selfish, or women without kids can't possibly be happy, or whatever, and you feel as though it's a personal attack, you might be in victim mode. I definitely felt this way. Sometimes. I actually still feel it when I read those still feel it when I read those articles in the media, and they come up shockingly often that you see an article out there that says something about childless women that's not entirely positive and and I do sort of get that feeling of being attacked, and I have to spend a few minutes sort of shifting myself back out of that. 

And that is something else again. I teach these tools. There's so many tools behind these that behind these that help you to sort of solidify this or embody this shift, this mindset shift. But what I really want you to get from this episode is that the first step is just noticing. It's noticing what kind of frame of mind are you in, what kind of mindset are you holding right now? 

So hopefully these, these signs of being kind of this victim and how he will help you to wake up to it. And for me, it was a process to wake up to how I was feeling, as I said, I didn't, you know, I noticed it in bits and pieces, like I noticed it when I was in my early 30s. Noticed it again, you know, later on. So it was definitely a process. 

And, you know, it was so much easier to ask other people to change, like, just stop asking all the questions. It was easier to ask them, to do that than it was for me to change, for me to change my mindset, and then to actually, or to even it was a process that you can just notice I was in my mindset, let alone to change it. So noticing it, as I said, the first step, and once I realized that I wasn't empowering myself, and in fact, I was doing the opposite, then it became the first in a series of steps that actually changed the mindset that actually allowed me to embody the new mindset, and that changed my life entirely, not just how I handle being a woman without kids, but every aspect of my life. 

So you might resist this whole episode. I did as well, or I did. I resisted this whole idea, and I think most people do, because it is easier to ask other people to change than it is to change ourselves, and that's okay. All I ask is that you let it percolate, percolate a bit, see how you feel in a few days, and if something has shifted, even if it's a micro shift for you, come back next week for another episode in this summer series. I have another one coming, and that is going to move a bit further towards getting through the questions with grace and ethnicity. So that's it for today's episode.