The Special Needs Mom Podcast
The Special Needs Mom Podcast
What Supporting Yourself Really Looks Like
I share a personal story today about my journey with pelvic floor physical therapy, and how I’ve been learning to support myself in ways that match my resistance. After some humorous missteps with scheduling and a lot of self-judgment, I realized that getting the right kind of support—whether it’s a coach, a friend, or even a check-in system—can make all the difference when it comes to sticking with something that feels hard.
I talk about a concept I love: getting support sufficient to your resistance. We often do this for our kids, but how often do we apply it to ourselves? It's about recognizing that resistance isn't a problem, but the lack of the right kind of support is. This episode is all about finding the right tools and structures to help you get where you want to go, without judgment or guilt.
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Hi, I am Kara, life coach, wife and mom to four incredible and unique children. It wasn't all that long ago that my son received a diagnosis that had my world come crashing down. I lacked the ability to see past the circumstances, which felt impossible and the dreams I once had for my life and family felt destroyed. Fast forward, past many years of surviving and not at all thriving, and you'll see a mom who trusts that she can handle anything that comes her way and has access to the power and confidence that once felt so lacking. I created the Special Needs Mom podcast to create connection and community with moms who find themselves feeling trapped and with no one who really understands. My intention is to spark the flare of possibility in your own life. And rekindle your ability to dream. This isn't a podcast about your special needs child. This is a podcast about you. If you are a mom who feels anxious, alone or stuck, then you are in the right place. Welcome,
Hello and welcome to the Special Needs Mom podcast. I'm so glad you're here. All right. This episode, like so many episodes, is going to start with a personal story, a inspiration for my very own life. And, I couldn't actually remember where I was when I thought to myself, Ooh, this could be a fun podcast episode. So to start off, let's talk for a minute about what happens to your body after birthing four babies. One of those babies being 10 pounds, five ounces. So, yes, we're talking about my pelvic floor and so I'm 44 years old and things are not, as they once were. I won't, delight you with any more details, but I will say that I am wanting to make sure that my body. Can support my life and my dreams, so I'm trying to be proactive with my care. So what do I do? I scheduled an appointment with a pelvic floor pt. Now, not looking forward to that appointment, but I did it and funny story about this is that, you know, I finally get around to scheduling the appointment, get it scheduled, and it's like a couple months away, which is fine. I'm like, eh, it's, I'm not in a hurry. It's no big deal. Then the day of the appointment comes. And I hit like the worst, the worst traffic on the way there. So I missed the appointment and I was pretty bummed because, I mean, let's be honest, you and I are both pretty much experts at medical appointments and so it is a rare moment that that kind of thing happens. But then I, reschedule the appointment. And I think it was for about a month later, and I arrived to the appointment only to realize that my actual appointment was same day, same time, one month later. So a little practice run. I did get there on time and I didn't yet have the appointment. So third time around I finally get in to the pelvic floor physical therapist. And, we do our appointment, which wasn't very pleasant, I'm gonna say that, but I, I got through it and I left the appointment. Like we leave. I don't know if you've ever been to physical therapy. Well, I, my guess is that you have and, or with your child. So typically you leave with a couple pieces of paper with all the different exercises on it, and a boatload of optimism. About how you're going to do said exercises, right? So fast forward about a month. I had my follow-up appointment coming up, and do you wanna know how many times I successfully completed my exercises? You probably guessed it was zero, actually, zero. Not one single time. I thought of them a lot. Like a lot. And I looked at the paper and I never got myself to read the paper of the exercises, but I did move it around in my office a lot of times. So the thing I did next is something that I've learned along the way as a coach, and I want to share the concept. With you because it's really helpful and what I'm all about is, or my mission I should say, is for moms to be fully supported in all areas of their life. I don't actually have a formal mission written out, so I might change it every couple weeks, but it always has to do with moms activating and really becoming fully. In ownership of how their life's going. Even I know guys, even when every circumstance around makes that really difficult or can make that very difficult. So I had a couple options. I was headed toward this appointment, like, you know, anticipating, and it was about a week away and I had some options that I entertained and. It kind of breaks down to, three options. One, cancel the appointment. My goodness. especially since the appointment was seven o'clock in the morning. It was right after daylight savings, and I was like really having a hard time getting up. So I was like, yeah, I should, why am I going, why, why would I do this to myself? So I thought about canceling the appointment, scratch the idea. Say, you know what my pelvic floor is, is what it is. We're gonna move on. Second option is to judge myself for not doing them. Maybe feel shame or embarrassment. Jump on the narrative of there's something wrong with me. And, that whole train. Another option is to keep the appointment and consider how I could use it to. Support myself to get the support that I needed. I'm pretty sure you can go which option I took, but we're gonna leave a cliffhanger here for you. And, at the end, I'm going to tell you the exact process I took in full detail. So it'll really, I think, bring the concept to life. And the concept I wanted to talk about today is. What I probably say it 12 times a week as I'm coaching with, with different people, either individually or in groups. And the concept, something that I learned in my own coach training, program, and it's getting support that is sufficient to your resistance. I wanna break it down a little bit. Maybe say in another way,'cause The language might be like, huh, what are you talking about? Another way of saying it would be to get help sufficient to your needs. And as I was preparing for this episode, I was like, oh my gosh, this concept should actually be pretty familiar to us because we're constantly doing this to support our children. We're constantly evaluating their current abilities, noticing the gaps, and creating bridges for them to be able to do the thing that they need to do, like. For instance, and so we're constantly doing this, but you know, us moms have a brilliant way of supporting our children, but sometimes, well, a lot of times completely neglecting ourselves. So even though we know this concept, we may not be applying it to our own lives, and so that's why we're shining the light on it today. And I'm just obviously bringing more language to a concept that when we, you know, bring something from kind of far away out there to close and part of our language, it makes it a little bit more real and attainable. Firstly, I think it starts with, instead of making ourselves wrong for having said resistance, or in other words not doing something, we can accept that as humans, we have resistance. We have reasons why we don't do things, and that's just what it is. It's neither good nor bad, it just is. That's acceptance. it's only when this resistance gets between us and something we want that we have a problem. Like I have resistance to running across the street when traffic is headed toward me, and I'm great with that. I think that's great resistance to have and so, it's not always a problem, it's just something to notice or to be aware of when it's getting in the way of something that we want. And with my example, I want a strong pelvic floor. So I broke it down into an equation. I love formulas. I, I mean, I don't love math. I wouldn't say I'm a math lover, but I do love formulas. I love concrete things. So it's a simple equation. Hard thing is on one side and on the other side, having the support you need or the support to do the hard thing. And in between you remember those little, like little less than greater too or equal symbols for math. I always learn, I was talking, so my, my husband, he was the math teacher before his, his role now. And so we were just recently talking about this, that I learned it as like the alligator. Eats the big thing. He learned it as. The one that looks more like an L is the less than sign. So consider that you might need to see it. Okay. But whichever is out of the equation. Has the most weight or heft will win. It will be the thing that is the result. So whatever, and I'm saying hard thing, right? It actually doesn't have to be a very hard thing. If it's a really hard thing, consider that you might need a lot of support. If it's just a medium or small thing. That we want to do or we want to have, we may not need a ton of support. We may need very little support. So consider that if there's a gradient, right? And when we're looking at this, sometimes, many times, most of the time we're going to think we have what we need. it's only going to be in the looking back and the observation where we're going to recognize and acknowledge and hopefully accept that we didn't have support sufficient to our resistance. And so that's a crucial moment when we recognize, okay, something was missing. This is the opportunity to change the formula. To try something different to see if it works. in my own coaching practice, I feel like I'll go through waves of saying something all the time and one of my favorites, I haven't been saying it lately, I'm gonna have to bring it back, is saying it's all an experiment. Recognizing that, like, especially this concept today, when we go try something, we're. Figuring out what will happen if we do or don't do that thing. Looking like any good scientist, they're looking back and saying, okay, what did I learn from that? And based on what I learned, what will I do now? What's the next step? So it's all an experiment. And the reason I like that saying is because it suggests that. There's no judgment necessary. We're not assessing whether it was good or bad. We're not saying we were weak or strong. We're just making an observation saying, I thought I was gonna do that thing. And it turns out that I didn't. So no judgment is necessary. What we're really looking to do is observe like a little sentence. I want you to picture a lab coat, a clipboard, maybe some glasses. That's who I want you to embody when you are doing this particular concept. And as I'm working with people designing their own structure or support that is sufficient. Sometimes I'll ask this question the question is, what would make it inevitable that you accomplish this goal? And sometimes it takes a minute to be like, huh? But it's a good question to start to acknowledge. What would make it so that it was absolutely certain that you were able to do the thing or have the action, take the action that you wanted to take? Sometimes it helps expose where we're stuck, and like I said earlier, sometimes we'll think we know what that is, but it's only through looking back and evaluating that we recognize that we actually didn't know the answer to that question. The other thing I wanted to mention that's super, I think valuable to consider is that we have a culture that is what I'm calling solo culture. our default is thinking that we need to do something on our own. So we often get stuck in the trap of not even thinking of how to not do something on her own. so I wanted to brainstorm, actually, I wanted to kind of just give you ideas, for what, the support or what the structure of the support might look like. It's obviously quite unlimited, but. Sometimes I think we don't recognize how little pieces of support can really be helpful. And actually, I wanna say something too. So I use the word structure and support a little bit synonymously, but the concept actually is what's the structure that sufficient to your resistance? And what I mean by structure is kind of like, how's it gonna work? Like, what are the things that you're gonna do or not do? What are the mechanisms that will have you be supported? That's what I mean by structure. So simple ideas is like an accountability partner. And so this could look like your gym, what are they called? Trainers. Clearly I don't have one. So it could be like a gym trainer, it could be a coach, obviously, could be a friend, could be a husband, could be a wife, could be all the different people in your life. Could be a, I, I think I said friend, right? So that can be very effective. and then you can use accountability partners in a. Huge variety of ways. Something like a five minute daily check-in or a text, a daily text, or reporting progress or. You know, celebrations could be a lot of different ways, but those are structures that you might consider would help be sufficient support to compensate or to outweigh the equation, if you will, for your resistance. Sometimes public commitment, either public or like semi-public. So perhaps it's in a group. Actually, I was thinking of AA as I was creating this. content here is like, oh, that's a structure sufficient to many people's resistance. Recognizing one, That there's meetings. That people go to weekly, that there's sponsors that people have in terms of creating a higher level of structure because clearly the nature of aa, there's a lot of resistance for a lot of people in sobriety. So that's a structure sufficient to people's resistance. Relationship is one that now is coming to my mind. Being in relationship could be a structure that's sufficient. Okay, what else do we have? So progress tracker. So some sort of tracking system. Could be visual progress board, this spreadsheet, habit tracker, you know, phone apps, all the different things. Those can be structures. Using that, you can gamify it. So perhaps you say, Hey, after I do this 10 times, I'm going to give myself a gift to go get myself a manicure or some sort of reward that gamifies it for you. So obviously it's deeply personal on what would be motivating to you. Sometimes setting like a micro goal, or I might even say making the goal smaller. So some of those might actually shift, enough for you to make some forward progress and create some momentum to be able to kind of be a stepping stone to the bigger thing that you're after. And make it a non-negotiable appointment. So this is like applied to something that you're specifically going to do or you want to do. And, you know, many of us would never consider, you know, ditching a friend, if we were gonna meet them at 10 o'clock on Tuesday, we would show up 10 out of 10 times. But if you could put in your calendar, show up to exercise at 10 o'clock on Tuesday. It's very likely, I'd say like the vast majority of us would not show up to that appointment, so. There's different structures we can use to make this a non-negotiable appointment. Sometimes it's enough even saying, Hey, like I can't move this. I will not move this appointment. sometimes that's enough, even though that's just like maybe putting it in your calendar versus thinking that you're gonna do it. So that's a very simple shift, but could be enough. and then I wanted to highlight that we've done this before in the Pathway to Peace. Coaching community where we create a non-negotiable appointment as in, we call it a power hour, where we all meet together at a certain time and place to be able to do things that we decide we wanna use that structure for. So you can actually schedule this with somebody and say, Hey, friend. I need to fill out that paperwork that I have been avoiding.'cause I really don't wanna do it and I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about it. Will you meet on a Zoom call with me and. You can work on whatever you want. You can go clean your house, whatever, but I'm gonna do this thing and I'm gonna check in with you at 10 o'clock and then at 11 o'clock to let you know how much I've accomplished. So these are all, of course, we're brainstorming ideas. They're endless, and it's actually amazing to hear all the different ideas people can come up with when they get this concept. So back to my own story and example. So recapping the three options that I was entertaining. One was cancel the appointment, give up. One was judge myself and have a lot of feelings about myself and my insufficiency of not doing it, or third option was to keep the appointment and to consider how I was going to use it to support myself. So big surprise. I chose number three. But I do wanna, you know, fully disclose that like I tiptoed in option number two, judge myself for not doing them. I think it's real easy, as I coach people, and I technically like in quotes, know how to do something, to have thoughts about myself when I don't do something, when I feel at something. And so, yes, I do tiptoe over there in feeling shame or embarrassed or insufficient. And through practice I'm usually able to identify that and not kinda let it take me down. So it's almost like I glance over at that road. I might head that way for a second, but I'm able to course correct, most of the time, not all of the time, because I'm human. Okay, so I went with option three as I mentioned, and in the week as I approached the appointment, I started to kind of entertain these types of questions. I was just being curious. That's like the whole point here is I was being curious with myself on what was, what was gonna make it different for me this time around. So one question I asked myself is, what was keeping me from doing the exercises? Okay, so what was keeping me from it and what would help me get over it? Another question I was contemplating is, what am I committed to? I'm gonna go in there seven o'clock on Thursday morning, I'm gonna face this lady. What am I committing to? She was really sweet by the way. Another question is what support, like what do I need with all of this? What res, like what support do I need that's going to be sufficient to my resistance to any of the answers above? So the answers I had come up with was to, what was keeping me from doing the exercises is like, you know what? Like, they were just like unfamiliar. Like I, for whatever reason, I just didn't, reading the paper felt hard. And I didn't wanna do it, and I didn't know how long the exercises would take. I didn't know if I'd be doing them right. And it just felt hard. And I think that part about, I didn't know how long they would take. It was like, I didn't know how long I was committing to once I started them. And so of course the natural answer is just don't start them. And so that's kind of what I noticed. I'm like, okay, all those things were happening. to the second question, what would allow me to get over the hump? I needed to get familiar with the exercises so they didn't feel so intimidating. So that was something that was really key that identified to question what was I committed to. So I was committed to going to the appointment. I was clear in that I was also committed to using the appointment. To help me get over the hump, to really use the appointment structure as a way of me, telling her the support that I needed and then having a follow up to check in on how I was doing. I got clear that I was committed to doing the exercises. I told her before I left the appointment that I was committed to doing the exercises 10 times. That was what I was committing to in a 14 day period. I think the appointments I have are two weeks apart. I. then the other answers I came up with were what support would be sufficient for my resistance to any of the above. And so what I decided and what I did during the appointment was I wanted to run through the exercises with her, like I was doing them at home so I could see the whole routine, so I could be familiar with it. There was no longer any mystery. I would be able to ask any questions so that like if I got stuck anywhere along the way, that that wouldn't be a sticking point. I had this high level of support'cause she was like watching me do them and like I mentioned, I also told her my commitment. One of the other things that I intended on doing that I haven't got to doing, that I'm just doing in my mind at this point. Is creating a checklist on like which days I've done it so I can visually see like how I'm doing and also to, yeah, just remember, to me it's been really motivating, knowing that like I have a little bit of margin. Like, so if I miss a day that it's not like, okay, well, too bad I'm not perfect. I'm giving up altogether. Like I'm, I'm recognizing as I'm in this, doing it, experimenting, if you will, that it's really helpful to me to have decided and designed in grace like cushion to not say, okay, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna do it 14 times and 14 days. And if I don't, then I'm not coming to the appointment. Okay. So you guys wanna know how I've been doing? it's only been four days since the appointment, and I've done my exercises three times. So I am on track, and I will say last night when I was doing the exercises, I was like, I feel at e bit stronger. Part of the problem with this man is like, it's, humbling to feel so weak. I'm like, geez, Louise. I mean, I knew my abs weren't in good situation. It's worse than I thought. okay. So, we're gonna wrap up there and I hope that, because I use like this very clear concrete example of what I mean by giving yourself support Or creating a structure that's sufficient to your resistance, that you're really able to like grasp on to this concept so that you can apply it in your own life. And in almost all the cases they involve you getting out of doing it on your own. And one of our mottos here is together is the only way. So that works nicely, doesn't it? All right, I would love to hear the ideas that came to you during this episode. And you can actually easily get in touch with me via the text, the show feature that I have. So you should see on the show notes a very easy to find link saying text the show Note that I will not be able to see your number, your name. All I get is where you texted from. Like the city. And so I would love to hear from you and hear what you took from this episode. And of course anything else you have to share. And with that, I will see you on the next episode. I.