5. Emotional Independence: Interview with Lacey Jones Coaching

My friend Lacey Jones Coaching interviews me about emotional independence. I tell stories about my first solo international vacation and my recent international vacation with my daughter.

Coaching Tools:

• Making peace with worst-case scenario
• Deciding that nothing has gone wrong
• Self-acceptance and love vs. all-or-nothing thinking

Thoughts:

• What you want matters
• You have everything you need

Go find Lacey's podcast Elevate the Individual to hear more from her!

You found me! If what you heard on the No Empty Chairs podcast gives you hope for more help, please schedule a free Conversation with Candice. You can also visit candiceclarkcoaching.com for more information about how coaching tools can help you keep your relationship with your children and your faith. While you're there, be sure to pull up a chair and sign up with your email to be the first to know about news and events for moms whose kids don't come to church.

It's going to be okay, and even better!

Transcript

Candice Clark: So I coach moms whose kids don't come to church. I have five of those myself and plus one daughter in law, and I‘ve found that the coaching tools help me navigate those relationships with greater love for myself and for my children.

Lacey Jones: Okay, and with that, at what point were you introduced to coaching and the coaching concepts was in the middle of navigating kids and differences or what point did you learn about the coaching tools?

CC: Yeah, it was actually before that. It was in the middle of my divorce in 2018, actually. I had my sister-in-law told me about Jody Moore and my friend Marilyn from church told me about Jody Moore, and I started listening to her podcast. I was separated but not divorced. And so our kids spent three weeks with me for summertime, and then they went and spent three weeks with their dad. And so during that three weeks, I decided to go on a vacation by myself. And so I went to Austria and me and Jodi. And so I listened to every single one of her podcasts, and it just really helped me. It already, just hearing her talk about those concepts, changed the way I was thinking about my life and my experience and helped me feel more empowered and like I was going to be okay.

LJ: Had you ever gone on vacation by yourself before?

CC: No, I had gone to visit family. I think I'd gone to visit my parents without my kids once, but that was the first time I had had that much stretch of time without having other people to take care of.

LJ: Yeah, because at that point, you've got teenagers, right, in your family. Teenagers. And so that's a big step, I would think. Like, I'm thinking over here, like, wait a minute, would I get on a plane and go to Austria? That's a big step. So what did it take emotionally to do that? Okay, two questions. How did you prep yourself emotionally to do that? Because I think it was probably outside of your comfort zone. Zone or outside of the norm? That's first question. Second question is who is Candice before going? And who is Candice coming home from that?

CC: Yeah. So I went on study abroad to Austria, to Vienna when I was in college okay and spoke German. And so it was kind of the right amount of uncomfortable for me. Like, I'm not super fluent in German, but I felt like I would be fine. Most people in Vienna speak English. But I actually had a hard time making that decision to go. And I remember sitting at my brother's house with my computer, looking at the airfare and struggling to hit the button. What kind of tipped the balance, actually, this also goes to the right amount of uncomfortable, is my cousin lives in Austria, and we have not been in touch for years, but his brother and the brother's wife were planning to visit during this same time frame. And so I ended up spending a week in Vienna by myself. And then I met up with my cousin for a couple days, and then I spent more time in Salzburg by myself. So it was a little bit like, okay, I'm stepping out, but then there's these people sort of making it easier for me to have these connections. Really, the hardest thing was spending the money on the plane ticket for myself, because that wasn't something I did, was spend money on things that I wanted to do. And it was a way of taking care of myself, because I thought three weeks at home without my kids when I had been an at-home parent for two decades, I could not even conceive of how that was going to go for me. So I'm going to go do this other thing. So I ended up doing it. It was not like a cut and dried decision, but I got myself there, and it was really good. And as I'm walking all over the grounds of this palace in Vienna, I'm listening to Jody talk about how my thoughts create my feelings. And that was just new to me, so that was, like, my deep dive. The start of my deep dive into coaching.  I just went into her podcast full bore. But I'm a little bit of a slow drip because it was two more years before I decided to join her program, but when I did, I signed up immediately for coaching and ended up on a call where Jody coached me. And that really is a moment that is pivotal in my life. So I have five children, and my fourth child had turned 18 and didn't have to go back and forth between the parents anymore. And without any conversation, my youngest child just also stopped coming. They both just didn't show up for my parenting time the next time after number 4 turned 18. And so I suffered over this for months. There was some drama. I was trying to figure out what I should do legally and practically, and dealing with my daughter's therapist about what the best way to handle it for her would be. And all of these things where I just felt like this should not be happening. I have been the person who has taken care of my kids, and this is just–I can't believe this is happening, and it shouldn't be happening. And she's missing out, and I'm missing out. I had all kinds of thoughts about it and was in a lot of suffering for about a year. In October a year later, I had this coaching session with Jody, and she just helped me see that the circumstances of whether or not a 15 year old stays in my house are not something that I can control unless I'm going to tire down.

LJ: We have options, but options have consequences.

CC: The options that would keep her in my house are not the ones that I want to employ. Right. So I live within walking distance of her dad's house on purpose, and that is the house where she's lived since she's two years old. So I get that she probably had her reasons, but it was very painful for me. But just recognizing that I couldn't change any of the people around in the story, I couldn't change my daughter's preferences, I couldn't change what her dad would do about how she managed that, I couldn't change any of that. But I could decide that I was the only one suffering and that I didn't want to do that anymore.

LJ: I know beautiful might not be the word, but from the outside perspective, it is beautiful because you've taken this trip that is physically independent of other people or of your norm, I guess. Right. You have other people on the other end that you're going to visit and spend time with, but it really is kind of a physical independence of leaving and going to a different country and stepping outside of that. But also it begins your process of your emotional independence and introduces you to some concepts so that you can then start to separate your feelings, your emotions, your choices from those of your children and what's going on over there. So it's really kind of beautiful how those two things work together along with it. And so as you continue to seek kind of your emotional independence through all of this situation, what roadblocks do you see? Have you come up against what has been maybe some friction points?

CC: Well, it can be really hard to shift your mindset. And it wasn't instantaneous for me in that moment. It took a couple of weeks for me to remind myself continually that my daughter has everything she needs. That was the thing that I kept coming back to, which for me is a position of faith. That's something that I already believed. And so just reminding myself, this must be okay. If my daughter needs something, she'll have it, because that's my belief system, that nothing's gone wrong here. This is going to be okay, and I'm going to be okay. And so what do I want to do now? But new opportunities come up all the time, right, to have ideas about things that should be different. So this youngest child, I just recently got back from a trip with her.

LJ: Just wrote that down. I was like, wait till we see the journey that these two individuals have been on. Because you just returned home from a trip with her.

CC: Yes, we came back from France, and there were all kinds of opportunities for me to watch my brain and manage my own experience as that came along. One of the very first ones was that she had ordered a new passport, and I had an idea about when she should have done that, and that was probably a lot earlier than she actually did it, but it ended up not arriving in time for her to get on the flight with me. And so since I knew this was a possibility all along, I'd been practicing, thinking, well, I'm getting on a plane on July 1. This is something that I'm going to do, and hopefully she'll be coming with me. Because I had separated out my experience from hers, I was able to just go, “oh, yeah, I am going to go get on that plane, and I'm going to go spend two days in Paris waiting for her to arrive on a later flight after her passport arrives. And then we're going to drive off to go visit our friends”. But all of that ability to navigate that, it was not terribly stressful because I just made some decisions. Some of them were ahead of time that had prepared me, and also I didn't need my daughter to be with me for it to be okay. I had envisioned this trip where we were going to go together. Now we're not going together. And do I want to be upset about that or do I just want to go enjoy my time that  I have in Paris? Those are kind of the options. I can have a lot of drama about being mad about when somebody should have submitted something or what the post office should have done or all the other things, or I can just acknowledge, “oh, this is the way it is.” I love Byron Katie: when you argue with reality, you just lose only every time. And I decided not to. And the skill that I have practiced of deciding not to argue with reality has served me really well and helped me to have a better emotional experience. Even, I think my daughter was fairly stressed.

LJ: Okay.

CC: And I just well, good luck. I got her all situated for the next flight and said, “if your passport doesn't come on Monday, make sure you call before the flight takes off so you can rebook a new one. Just good luck to you.” And I just really didn't worry about it anymore. I mean, she's 18 now, so it's not like I was doing this with a five-year-old.

LJ: Yeah, well, and there's two sides of the coin there, right, that you talked about. So the passport is not arriving on time, and we can either be stressed and crazy and angry about it, or we can say “it is what it is and I choose this over here.” And there's a couple of things I liked in what you were saying, like you prepared for future events, and you kind of saw this going the two different ways. Either it's going to arrive on time or there's a chance that it's not going to arrive on time. And so that preparation that you did really serves in your emotional well being because you kind of prepared beforehand and you weren't naive to the fact that this could possibly go this direction. And I really want it to be perfect. I'm just going to say it's going to work out. Like, you really, I think, sat with it and looked at the options of what could potentially go on here.

CC: Yeah, it's making peace with the worst case scenario, right. If that happens, it's going to be okay, and I'm going to figure out where to go next.

LJ: Okay. Great coaching tool right there. Like, making peace with the worst case scenario. Because once you got to Paris, what was your experience like, waiting for your daughter to show up?

CC: Well, it really was not an experience of waiting for my daughter to show up. I just enjoyed being in Paris. It was an experience of being in Paris. And I walked all over the city, and I went to an art museum and bumped into Susan Sarandon, which was fun. So I had a great time! I'm like, I don't need to change my ticket. I'm going to get myself to the airport. And at the gate, I'm booking an Airbnb and changing the car rental because I don't want to pick up the car until we're leaving Paris. And I just took care of it. It was different than we thought it was going to be, and it was also great. And another element of this trip that I had to adjust is I had envisioned a little bit like my trip to Austria, where I just was out walking all day long. I went and did things, and I just saw things, and I just walked around. I had a 13-mile day one day. It was awesome! And so I had kind of envisioned that we're going to go and we're going to walk all over the place and see things, and it's going to be great. And my daughter just came out of graduating from high school and getting all these exams, all this stuff she's been doing, and she did not want to go all over the place having new experiences all day long.

LJ: Different vision for the trip than you had.

CC: Yes. And we'd kind of talked about, yeah, we're going to walk around and do things, but really hadn't articulated in detail what that looked like in each of our minds. And so pretty quickly after we got to the little town where my friends live that we were staying with, I realized, oh, she wants to have a different vacation than the one I had in mind. And I'm just really proud of myself that I was able to make space for that. There was a time the mom that I was ten years ago would have been like, “well, this is our vacation, and this is what we're doing. So get up and get ready. Let's get out of here. We're hitting the road.” And maybe there are places to do that. And when you have a lot of people involved, sometimes the parents just decide. But it was just the two of us. And I just decided I just wanted to let her have her slow, long morning. And so I would get up and I would go on a run in this cute little French town and run around the chateau and run around the church and run around the green space and all the different places on the different days, and then bring back a pastry on my way back.

LJ: I love it.

CC: And then just let her go at her own speed. And then we would go somewhere. We'd drive to some other town in the area and go look at some site or something. And most of the days we just did one thing. We went and saw a chateau, or we went and saw a garden, and then we went back to our friend's place and just hung out with them and played Hearts and worked on their jigsaw puzzles. So it was a great vacation! It wasn't like the super hyper tourism vacation that I had thought it was going to be, but it's possible that I could have pushed for her to do it my original way, and then she would have had thoughts and feelings about that and behaviors that exhibited, and then I could blame her for ruining my vacation. It's possible that I could let her have her way and I could blame her for ruining my vacation. But I really just decided, what do I want? And what I wanted was to be where my daughter was and spend time with her. And she didn't want to do everything that we did, but she did. And so it was a two-way street. She was making accommodations for the things I wanted and I was making accommodations for the things she wanted, but I wasn't making her in charge of whether or not I enjoyed my vacation by how she acted.

LJ: And that right there is emotional independence. Right. You take ownership of your experience no matter the circumstances, and there's not that blame and victim cycle right, of all of that. And so I'm just sitting here. I've known Candice how long have we known each other? Since the original certification in 2021.

CC: Yeah, three years going on.

LJ: And the maturity that has developed, I'm sure maybe you've seen that in me, but I see it so much in you and your relationships to your children, your family and yourself. And so when you step back and you reflect on Candice of 2023 and Candice of let's go to even, 2018, what is the biggest thing that you notice as you step back and reflect on yourself in those two different times of your life?

CC: I think the biggest difference is my confidence. I was very worried in 2018. And to be fair, there was some uncertainty in my life. There were things I didn't have control over that I was waiting for them to settle before I could make some decisions around. But even so, I think…so in 2018, I had I don't think any of my kids were going to church at that point. And there's the possibility that you can think, “oh, is this because of the divorce happening, or is this all kinds of reasons?” And I think a lot of the things actually not the divorce, but in the marriage relationship, in the family, contributed to their experience at church. But what I notice now, I don't actually worry that they don't come to church like that. They don't participate in my faith community, because I just think that that's their journey and they're going to have everything that they need. I just have decided to believe that it's going to be okay. And I'm lucky, at least to my knowledge, my kids aren't engaging in physically dangerous activities, right? They have jobs or are going to school, and they're pretty healthy people, which I think does make it a little easier to believe everything's going to be okay. But I have really worked on my own ability to love them exactly as they are. And I think my growth and confidence of loving myself exactly as I am and where I am has been the key that I don't know which necessarily comes first. I think they fuel each other. As we get better at loving people without judging them or needing them to be different, we get better at loving ourselves without judging us or needing us to be different, which does not preclude our growth. In fact, it makes a safer space for us to grow in.

LJ: I'm over here scribbling notes and all these one line I'm like, oh, my gosh, go back to this. If she doesn't cover this, go back to this. And I write as you're saying this ability to love your children exactly as they are. I wrote down that you can love yourself exactly as you are. And so that's kind of one of the purposes of this podcast is to elevate the individual. Because when you get an individual and you help them to see who they are exactly as they are, and to love themselves exactly as they are, they carry that forward to their family. So then you carry that to your children, and you love your children exactly as they are. Well, the result of a mom and children and a family who loves themselves exactly as they are, the good, the bad, the ugly.  And they go out into society. They show up so differently than if a mom or the family is not happy with who they are. The choices they make and the empowerment that comes along with that and how they serve a community is just so different and so, yes, you nailed it. You can love your children exactly as they are because you are first, I would say first, but you're also kind of commingling and working together on loving who we are individually. And so what advice would you give to mothers who are seeking this love for themselves, this emotional independence for themselves, who maybe haven't quite experienced they're more closer to like, 2018. Candice.

CC: Yeah. So maybe this will get at answering your question, but it's just another thought I've had. I think as we talk about accepting ourselves exactly as we are right now, there's a risk of having all or nothing thinking about it. We worry that, well, if I accept myself, then I'm just not going to get any better and grow and develop. And that's just a false premise. The choices are not stay the same or despise yourself until you get better. It's so much harder to get better when you despise yourself and when you think you're not worthwhile. It’s much, much easier to learn and grow from a place of love. I just think of a plant that has fertile soil and is well watered, loved. That's the best chance for growth. So I think the thing I want Moms to know is that they matter. What they want matters. It doesn't matter more than what anyone else in the family wants. It also doesn't matter less. Have desires. Our desires come from God. They're good. And figure out what is it that you want to do and then find a way to do it because it matters.

LJ: Scribbling notes while you're talking, I'm like, yes, right, okay. So you have these desires and these wants. How have you, through this journey, you've strengthened your own mental health. How have you been able to serve your community as a result of this? So let's go beyond yourself and your family now, your community.

CC: Yeah, a number of different ways. The latest thing that I've been working on that I'm so excited about is I am starting a podcast. It's called No Empty Chairs and it's for parents whose kids don't come to church. And just talking about some of the ways we think about our kids that are helpful and not helpful and ways that we think about our religion with respect to our kids that are helpful and not helpful and ways that I really feel like the love of God has touched me and expanded my capacity to love my kids that has blessed my life and blessed their lives and helped me to maintain some influence with them because I'm not trying to control them anymore. I'm just trying to love them. So podcast is coming up and I've been involved in some Facebook communities to support parents in this situation. And  I had kind of an interesting opportunity to get involved with the three practices community. So I've done a lot of three practice circles where we have a topic or a framing question and then someone takes two minutes to talk about it and people get to ask them questions. And it has this particular structure that really facilitates practicing skills of listening well and without an agenda and asking questions that are genuinely curious. I think people respond better when we're genuinely interested in them and not coming at them with trying to find our way in with what we think they should do. So that's been a fantastic opportunity as well. I've really enjoyed that. So I've done those online supports and then I've done some local in person support groups for people in mixed-faith families in my church community.

LJ: Love all of it. It's been so fun to see your growth and I love celebrating that. I'm like “Candice look at where you are compared to where you were here or there or like, it's beautiful growth.” And another piece of your community is me. When I have a question or I need a coach, you're the coach that I turn to because you are the one who is like, lacey, what's going on here? Why are we looking at this like you can get right to the heart of it. And I know from one of our previous sessions just the other day, I now have a new thought printed on my wall that you had helped me to work on and to get to, and I even shared it with another person in a conversation. But you've had this ripple effect and your community is online, in person, It's me, it's your clients, it's your podcast. And so it's really beautiful to see how you've taken this opportunity to develop. Really, I consider your own emotional independence. And your kids aren't here, your family is not here with us, so we don't know their side of it. But I'm just going to answer for them and say it's had an impact for the better on your relationship and if it hasn't, so be it, right? But you've had this beautiful impact on the community around you and so kudos to you.

CC: Oh, thank you, Lacey! I appreciate so much those kind words and I just feel like I have learned so much that I really want to share with other people what has helped me find more peace and connect in a new way with my faith and my belief in God. It's been fantastic and I really appreciate you as a coach colleague as well. So thank you so much.

LJ: Thank you. Okay, is there any one last message that you want to leave with our listeners? Is there anything that we haven't touched on or wanted to drive home a little bit more?

CC: Boy I think we've covered it. Maybe I'll just say that thought that I practiced in October 2020 for my daughter, was “she has everything she needs.”

LJ: That one was beautiful.

CC: I think maybe that's one people can take away with them is that I have everything I need, like, just right this minute. I have the air I need to breathe. I have the water I need, I have the food I need for today. I'm clothed and sheltered. I have everything I need. And so now I can go out and contribute in the world. 

LJ: Oh, I love it. Amen. All right, well, Candice, thank you so much for joining on the podcast today. And then we're going to put a link. You're going to send me all your links and all the podcast links, any forums that you're part of. We can put that in the show notes so that everyone can check your workout.

CC: Thank you so much, Lacey!