Triggered? Take Control Of Your Internal Dialogue with Rachel Randolph - Part 1

There's no lack of triggering topics and conversations happening all around you everyday. And while you can't always control what's coming at you, you can have more control over how you respond to those triggers and how you communicate during those situations. 

In part 1 of this conversations of the Divorce Curious Podcast, Lisa talks with communications expert Rachel Randolph, founder of the SPEC method, about how our internal experience impacts the way we communicate. 

Rachel shares how her family dynamics during her childhood left an imprint on how she views communications, how she's approached managing through the difficult conversations with family members, and how that has led her to develop an effective framework that she now shares with others to empower them to have more control over their inner dialogue and their external communication.  

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Have a comment for me or a topic you want to see covered on the podcast? Email me at lisa@lisamitchell.biz

Connect with me on Instagram at @divorcecurioushelp

Transcript

Lisa Mitchell (00:00)
Hey, welcome to another episode of the Divorce Curious Podcast. I am your host, Lisa Mitchell, and I am going to do an intro on top of my normal intro because I should have known once I got started talking with today's guest, Rachel Randolph, that we weren't gonna be able to just do one episode, that we were gonna keep yapping until we had at least two, maybe three episodes recorded. So this is gonna be number one, part one in my series with

My guest, Rachel Randolph, she's the founder of Spec Method. She's incredible. And you're going to want to stick around for this episode. Like, subscribe, share, and keep coming back for the rest of the series. Here we go.

Lisa Mitchell (00:44)
Hey friends, welcome to another episode of the Divorce Curious Show. I am your host, Lisa Mitchell, but more importantly, I am bringing you one of the most brilliant and amazing, just the depth of the person with me, whether you're watching us or you're listening to us.

Rachel (00:57)
you

Lisa Mitchell (01:00)
She is hard to sum up. Like we were just talking about, do I call you? What are we doing? Right? And there's no short answer. And that is just one of the reasons that I love my guest today, Rachel Randolph. Rachel and I, here's how it went. So Rachel and I met, I don't even know. It's been a minute, six, seven-ish years ago, I think, maybe.

Rachel (01:16)
you

Yeah.

Lisa Mitchell (01:24)
I just feel like you've been around forever. So it's hard for me to keep track. And I still debate if time is even real or not. So you're never going to get me, you're never going to get me to say it was a sunny morning on June 8th or whatever. but Rachel and I met and our first, our first meeting was a, know, like you kind of walk into a coffee shop and you feel a little weird because somebody told you, you need to meet this person. And you're like, all right, whatever. I'm super awkward meeting people.

Rachel (01:25)
Thanks.

you

Lisa Mitchell (01:51)
And then you open your mouth and then six hours later, you're shutting the restaurant down and the wait staff is like, can you please shut up and get out of here now? Because we're ready to put tables away and you're still sitting here. so that was think Rachel, I think that was one of those moments where there's a before and after there's before I knew Rachel. And then there's after I know Rachel.

Rachel (02:14)
Aww.

Lisa Mitchell (02:19)
And life is significantly better on the after side of that demarcation line. And I think everybody listening and watching this today is going to have the exact same experience. So we're going to get into why. And they'll figure it out. 10 minutes in, everybody's going be like, my god, she's brilliant. But Rachel, how about you introduce yourself here to my friends at Divorce Curious. good luck with that, because you're a lot.

Rachel (02:31)
Here we go.

Well first, thank you so much for having me on here. We've noodled on doing podcasts together for a long, long time. So I'm really, really happy and grateful to be here and you telling me a little bit about Divorce Curious and the mission behind it. I'm so on board and I really hope that the conversation that we have today can bring a lot of insight and perspective and fruitfulness to your listeners. So that's the first part.

How do I introduce myself? Gosh, I wanted to say like, I'm Rachel. Let the rest unfold. But I am a communication coach and I do it through introspection and mindfulness. So my bread and butter is going on the inside, understanding inner dialogue, understanding self-awareness and essentially alchemizing it into

Lisa Mitchell (03:20)
You

Rachel (03:38)
how we communicate and it's something that back when we met about seven, six, seven years ago, I looked around and saw that there was body language experts like yourself and I was like, wow, body language, that's so important. And then I saw communication coaches for public speaking like Alex and I was like, wow, that's amazing too. But like there's still something nagging at me about these.

approaches to communication, like what is it? And then I had a mindfulness coach and presence coach. And so I'm seeing all of these different facets of communication addressed individually, but where I stood was kind of in the middle, seeing that they weren't individual at all. The individual experience that someone is having is the...

the crux of all of those intersecting points. And I was like, aha, I found you. And so my journey with mental health and depression and anxiety really was lost on those different places that people could get help. And I just saw a huge gaping hole in where people needed to be moved from one...

Lisa Mitchell (04:38)
you

Rachel (04:58)
place to another, the mindfulness into the body language, into the somatic experience, into the public speaking component, articulation, tact, tone, inflection, gestures, all these things. And I'm like, they are all happening at the same time. We need to be talking about how they're all happening at the same time. And I was like waiting around for someone else to do it.

and looking for that person and they didn't exist in my circle, in my sphere. And so I started it. And that is where SPEC, my LLC is named SPEC School because it's an ongoing education of looking. Like SPEC is a root word in Latin to look, see, spectate, spectacle, introspection. I'm like, okay, well, if that's the thing, all of these things orbit around, that's where I'm gonna go.

And so that's where what I do is, was and is born from, because it's still evolving, it's never gonna stop.

Lisa Mitchell (05:59)
Yeah. I love that. Thanks for unpacking that. And I think one of the things that has been most interesting for me to watch as someone who is, you know, kind of been lurking, the shadows for a long time and appreciating the work that you're doing and, sending my people to you and sharing your stuff is because your evolution and your curiosity and your approach to how can I.

help people understand what they're experiencing in such a way that they can then communicate what that experience is like. So I think that's for so many, I mean, there's all sorts of tools and tactics and hacks and there's a million different ways that you can level up your communication if you're just kind of looking to check the box. But I think what is so unique and so special and ultimately so valuable.

Rachel (06:41)
Totally.

Lisa Mitchell (06:49)
about what you do is you really help people identify, put a language around what is so often mysterious from the internal experience of communication and then be able to leverage that into more effective external communication. that's, it's so hard to do because most things pick up at the outbound.

Rachel (07:10)
Yeah, exactly.

Lisa Mitchell (07:17)
They, they pick up at the, okay, this is what, this is how you want someone else to respond to what you're telling them instead of what is happening inside of you. That is then impacting everything else that is experienced externally from you. And that root cause approach or that, that internal driver approach, I think is something that you do that is so unique and ultimately so powerful.

Rachel (07:22)
Yes.

Lisa Mitchell (07:44)
and is really the position zero foundational type, superpower really of leveling up everything that you do, how you appear in the, how you take up space, how you articulate your words, how you receive information, right? Like you really are that, you help unravel that internal mystery for people. I think that is what most people are looking for when they're doing hacks and tricks and tools and

presentation skills, it's really the hell do I feel the way I do in my head that makes me come out this way? That's different than how I want to, you're, you're that thing that helps decode the inner, inner entanglement. think that most people just don't even want to think about, let alone like work on, because it is kind of confrontational to sit with yourself and be why am I the weirdo that I am?

Rachel (08:34)
Yeah, I really appreciate that recap and you perfectly synthesized, if I was to tell you the functionality of what I do and like the practical, the functionality of it, you just elaborated on the practicality in the real time work. And one thing that you said many years ago, you were like, I think people don't think that you're relatable because you speak from this place of

having already worked on yourself and worked out these kinks of your own inner mystery. And so then you're just going through life like, la-di-da, like it's so easy, so much fun. But the, the unrelatability component that I've really tried to work on over the years is that it's from turning all of that external, anything happening external, the books, the podcasts, the journaling even at some point.

was all outside of me and I just worked at one day at a time trying to bring all of that energy and attention to my internal experience. That way I could understand the response that I was getting from myself before I started wanting something external to happen. I didn't even understand why I was triggered as an example.

And that was just one little thing and one little situation and one person could open an entire world for me to evaluate. And it takes time. But it's not as scary and energy draining as I think a lot of people might imagine it to be because of the way that inner work has been framed for so long.

Therapy you gotta go to therapy. You gotta do that It's like forced into us and there's not and what I try to do why I speak from personal experience and never pain point of like What are you doing? If you're not doing this like what a piece of shit you are and it's like this is really hard to start but once you do you get a knack for one thing at a time and it's step by step and you're you have

Lisa Mitchell (10:22)
Yes.

Rachel (10:42)
that control and like I said before we got on here, everyone's telling you then that the only thing that you can control in life is your thoughts and your feelings and your responses to things, but no one's telling you how to have that control. And that's what I talk about. I'm the how. I'm that middle bridge between your inner world, making sense of it and translating it into your external world. And the, I mean, it's priceless.

For me, I went through the therapy and the medication and the existential crises and that cost me so much time. It cost me relationships, cost me inner peace, it cost me money, obviously. Externalizing anything cost me way more than sitting with myself. Especially energy. My God, so much energy wasted.

Lisa Mitchell (11:35)
Yeah, think it's the term I use a lot of times is like return on effort, right? it's a business term. It's a business term, right? how many hours of this does it take for you to get this output? And then how does the pricing model support, But I think when it comes to can you tell I've been working on strategic plans?

Rachel (11:39)
Yeah.

Yeah.

It's funny to business-ify

communication skills like that. I use ROI in it. I used it today. It's almost instant.

Lisa Mitchell (12:00)
Right.

it's a real thing. Your energy is not free. Your time is not free. Your emotions are not free. There is a cost. if the return, just like anything else, if you invest a certain amount of time or energetic effort into something, as long as the return is there. And I think for the work that you do, the return is really exponential. If I could invest in that.

Rachel (12:20)
Absolutely.

Lisa Mitchell (12:28)
with my Bitcoin wallet all day long, rank it up. you know, but, but I think, I think that the, the frame for so many people that are going to be listening to this specifically in my audience are people who are trying to make in many cases, my, my whole thing is like figuring out what the next best thing for you is.

Rachel (12:29)
Yeah.

Lisa Mitchell (12:50)
and then feeling supported and informed and empowered to then go do that, Whatever that next best thing is for you. But I think it's incredibly hard to effectively evaluate what the next best thing for you is if you are working from a strictly reactionary, external focused point of view. when we were talking through kind of what this conversation might look like and how it might best serve

the audience listening to it today, you brought up this, this super important point of understanding the inner dialogue that you are having that is then in some cases for, for conversations around marriage or relationships or impact to your family, You have this entire, before you ever open your mouth or send an email or shoot a text off, you have already played.

both characters in the exchange in your brain mentally, and you have decided how that's probably going to go.

And that can create an immense amount of fear and anxiety or maybe procrastination or, deciding not to advocate or speak for yourself. So how would you approach, if, if you're somebody who's sitting here and you're kind of in that. Internal, you're, having this big drawn out conversation in your head and you're playing both parts of the, both parts of the play, What, what would be.

Rachel (14:11)
you

Lisa Mitchell (14:16)
maybe some practical things that you could recommend or guide people through that would maybe put the focus back on that inner dialogue and give a little bit more perspective and control on that.

Rachel (14:30)
Yeah, so many things come to mind and then letting them distill into the most important thing, which is what I teach people how to do. So the first thing that I'll say is I'm not a marriage or divorce or anything expert. I am not qualified in any way outside of I have a brain and I'm doing the talking in my head all day every day, no matter what. And I think

Lisa Mitchell (14:40)
Right.

Me neither. I'm just a girl with the microphone. Yeah.

Rachel (14:59)
The very first place I would start is actually acknowledging that I'm having a dialogue with myself all day, every day. I don't get a choice. Everyone around me is doing that too. That is the actual first, it's like point, it's negative zero, the first crux point of the work, the work that I would recommend people to start from is just acknowledge that that's happening.

That is just a subtle, subtle shift into empowerment via responsibility. And I think that's important because that starts nudging us in the direction of being empowered and having that control when we acknowledge that that's happening to to for in us anyways. So that's point zero. The second place or the first after that place would be that there are two voices or multiple voices

from your past, from your present, from the fear of the future, from your grandma, from your parents that are all introducing different ideas, tones, emotions that are part of a multi-dimensional story. And so that is probably the second place is that it's a story that is unfolding inside of your head. And I know that sounds...

It sounds ridiculous saying it out loud, but if I were to pause and think and pay attention to my thought, I would hear a voice. I would hear some type of energy telling me words. The language that I speak, which is English, having dialogue in my head. So those are the first two places that I would start, and the reason for that is to draw back that energy into control.

into the how of evaluating these things before there is anything external that happens. And I think you're really right about the fear comes from what will happen, the unknown, the response of the other person. But that is, in my opinion or on my observation, raw energy that can be reused or reinvested into myself by saying, I'm having

an experience. What experience am I having? What story am I telling? And how do I interpret it? How do I want to interpret it? What do I want? And then the what's and the how's and the what's next can actually happen inside of that conversation that I'm having with myself. I start feeding it new or fresh information instead of just circling the circling the fire.

of my own fears. Start adding fresh perspective into that.

Lisa Mitchell (17:49)
Right.

I love that. something I hear a lot in these conversations around, kind of what keeps people not even just centering their own thoughts, but centering their own happiness or their own healthiness or their own desires, Is this, it feels selfish to focus on yourself and

Rachel (18:12)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Mitchell (18:14)
and really give yourself that energy, that emotional energy in this case. And so if I'm someone who feels like, well, it's indulgent to center myself, or it's selfish to center myself, or I don't have time to center myself because I have to think about my kids, or I have to think about, is there anything you can, any encouragement, permission, technique to just

Because it's all about worthiness, And it's all about how we view ourselves and prioritize ourselves. But I think it's such a struggle, even to give ourselves our own attention internally, can feel indulgent or selfish or whatever, How do you, do you ever run across that and how do you help people get over that?

Rachel (18:58)
Yeah.

think the first question I would ask if that were the scenario I was given, if you were sitting in front of me, I would just ask, that working for you? And start it out with your honest answer to that, which would then be your own fresh honesty within yourself. And then we would say, I mean, if you said no, it's a yes or no answer.

Lisa Mitchell (19:13)
Damn it, Rachel.

Rachel (19:29)
And so if it's not working for you, then I say, okay, now we create wiggle room to do different evaluations, ask different questions, prompt different action items out of your experience that will create a little bit of shimmy space for you to get new things in motion.

Lisa Mitchell (19:51)
I love that. I hate it because it's so confrontational and don't ask me that because you already know the answer and I don't want to own it. But also I think it sounds so simple, but to just even that little pattern interrupt of how is that working for you? Because we will bullshit ourselves into thinking everything's fine and we're great. And what we're doing is right until somebody, some voice.

Rachel (20:05)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Mitchell (20:17)
comes out of a podcast and says, hey, you friend that's ignoring your own inner dialogue and not giving yourself the space to reflect, how's that working for you?

Rachel (20:28)
Yeah,

and again, it's really important for me to not just come out guns-ablazing with somebody. That question is, if I were to ask that question to somebody, that's already done after there's been a rapport built. I did not pain point market them into oblivion to come at me all fearful with fixing energy. It would be already a standing,

I'm assuming that your listeners know, like, and trust you already. they're tuning in and that question isn't gonna just scare them out of their shoes because it's in the context of what we're talking about here, which is already an uncomfortable thing. Divorce is terrifying if I were to put myself in and empathize a bit cognitively with the situation that maybe the listeners are in. So understanding that there's some rapport built with

with me and that person before that question is ever uttered. I'm not gonna just try to carrot and stick somebody into working with me because I have the questions that are the ant like blah blah blah like so gross and I don't think the world is is okay with that.

Lisa Mitchell (21:32)
right.

Rachel (21:40)
practice anymore.

Lisa Mitchell (21:42)
No, no, I think you're right. And that's one of the things I appreciate and was reinforced when you declared it publicly recently on a LinkedIn post of you're not about the convert, Like convert is not a word, right? I love that. I was cheering so loud, especially you don't even know the context of what I've the rest of my life right now, but to see you put the flag in the ground of

It is not about converting. It's about connecting and it's about guiding, I was brava is what I'm going to say about that. So you need to follow Rachel, Rachel Randolph on LinkedIn for lots of reasons, for true, refreshing truth, if nothing else of how things can, you can grow in a different way that doesn't feel confrontational. But that's, that's my commercial for you, Rachel of if anybody's like, I don't know what it would feel like to work with.

Rachel (22:15)
Yeah.

Thank you.

Lisa Mitchell (22:34)
her, it's going to feel like somebody who's not worried or driving to convert you to be their client. That's just one of the many reasons I love you and your approach.

Rachel (22:41)
Thank you,

yeah. I mean, this is actually a really, really chef's kiss segue into the topic of your podcast, which is divorce, and being a child of separated parents has a lot to do with how I developed my perspectives.

Lisa Mitchell (23:00)
Hmm. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about that, Rachel. Cause I know you have a, a long and winding and ongoing tale to tell about the dynamics and how that has helped hindered or challenged you as you have grown into loving your specialty.

Rachel (23:01)
Yeah.

Yeah

would

also love this if there's anyone listening that's a child of divorced or separated parents who do not speak. was not reconciliation and it was not and it is currently not a what I would say a positive experience and then also my perspective as a coach is separate than my experience as a child and what I do and don't involve myself and engage myself in. So I think there's

There's a multifaceted way to have this conversation and I'll dip into some of those and I'll let you know when I'm going from inner child Rachel to coach Rachel. Well, okay, so from my mom, I won't go too much into details unless you want me to, but the important details are that my mom.

Lisa Mitchell (23:49)
Yes.

Love it. Let's go. Take us on the ride, Rachel.

Rachel (24:07)
the family, like me and my two sisters and my dad sat us down one, it's crazy that June is coming up quite a lot lately for me while we're in June. But it was literally maybe 20 years to the day that my mom sat us down in the kitchen, in the living room and said, I don't love your father anymore. I've been a mom for 18 years and I'm done. I'm leaving. And I just remember sitting there

saying, okay, go, I don't know what you're, like you clearly don't wanna be here. And I'm 14 at the time, so I am already entering the angsty teenager, like don't like my mom already, but now she throws this into the mix, I'm just like, I'm done with you. And so that was the story for, and I say story on purpose, because this is something that I have in myself for.

Lisa Mitchell (24:51)
Yeah.

Rachel (25:00)
the better part of 20 years. So about two or three years ago, I started doing some really heavy work on myself and that inner conversation, acknowledging that there was a story that I didn't have all the pieces of because I was a child when my mother left and I wasn't gonna have a sit down with her and be like, how was your mental health when you left your family? Like, I wasn't gonna do that at that age. And so.

Lisa Mitchell (25:27)
Right.

Yeah.

Rachel (25:28)
A lot of internal inner child work went into being able to say, don't have all the pieces to this story. This is not a complete picture of what my mother was going through at the time of her leaving. Just point like fact, ownership, empowerment via responsibility of what I did and didn't know about a certain situation. This is where the very early seeds of this began.

And so it still didn't mean that I spoke to her though. We have had very little contact the last 20 years, more so in the last year, of course, in last two years. But it started with planting that seed in myself, or maybe I heard it in passing. We have no idea. We have so many influences these days. It was probably some inner-child-wounded feminine thing that I in passing saw.

Lisa Mitchell (26:19)
some meme that flew by you on an Instagram story.

Rachel (26:22)
Dude, memes are

powerful, let me tell ya. I just need one little hit and I go into Instagram and I harvest an idea and I leave for six months and I'm like, god, that was a good one. So I imagine it was one of those situations that I just knew that it was important to me because it was a deep wound in myself and I was learning about all these wounding things but I didn't get a coach, I didn't have anybody.

Lisa Mitchell (26:25)
You they are.

you

Probably.

Rachel (26:48)
Therapists were useless when it came to this because they just told me what to think and what to do about a broken relationship rather than how to think about something differently. So this is all from my own work of self initiating the somatic and mindfulness introspection and then ultimately being able to have a conversation with my mother and say the words.

I am missing some information about this little thing that you did 20 years ago, like, I don't know, you wanna tell me a little bit about it? And fill in the gaps. And that was my mom's side of things. And over the years, my dad was, you know, a single father raised us. So on my dad's end in my inner child work was to...

He was really, really, really emotionally abusive and hard on me for most of my youth. But then when my mom left, he had to switch gears and he had to be both parents. And so my dad taught me how to communicate, taught me how to relate with people, taught me, you know, he's very patriotic and founding fathers and Marcus Aurelius. So I got this from 14 to 17, 18, my big teenage formative years.

I got a very masculine approach to relating to others, making things happen, discipline, goals, all of that, school, high school, into my, what I was gonna do after high school was all very my dad. And so then that bit didn't last very long though because I'm a woman and I have different components that I had to self teach. So.

I kind of Frankensteined my emotions together throughout my 20s. And this is the crux point of seeing that when I really needed information in this area, like the emotion area, I didn't have that many resources on understanding them. Or when I wanted to piece together how my logic worked, I only had just goals and public speaking. was like, there's just day to day things that I need to figure out though. It's not.

It's not these big dramatic experiences yet. And so those two experiences, having an absence of my mother's influence on many things, then my father's influence, heavy on my father's influence on other things, put me at a position to like logic my way through wanting to understand emotions and how they played a role, the story was happening, and how it either did work.

for me having communication with people or it didn't. And that's where I just used every trigger at some point as a moment to say, shit, that hurts so bad. What was all that about to myself? And so that is then now if you're tracking, that is where the evaluation of how to approach my relationship with my mother came from. I got the emotions.

Lisa Mitchell (29:27)
Yeah.

Right, right.

Rachel (29:49)
I'm understanding how I'm triggered. I'm understanding what happens when I'm triggered. I understanding that I fly off the fucking handle. Ooh, sorry, whatever, explicit. I fly off the handle. I can be very hot or I can be like a complete ice queen. And I noticed and registered those extremes in myself proactively. So then when it started to come to conversations with my mom, it went from like at first it was explosive and like, we can't talk. I can't do this to...

Lisa Mitchell (29:57)
You're fine.

Rachel (30:18)
two hour long conversations where she's telling me about her own childhood. And then she would say something and I eventually, like it took time, a lot of time to say, okay, now tell me what happened when you left. It took many, many months. And I think what I see people doing that doesn't work is they go right for the jugular.

with their parents or with people that affect them in these ways, they go and trigger them. go right for like, tell me, tell me why. And it needs to be rapport because that person is another person and there needs to be empathy, cognitive empathy. I can imagine what their experience was like, but I don't ever understand it. And then...

boundaries when the energy shifts into confrontation and say, okay, I think we've stepped into territory that we're not ready to address yet. Let's table it and talk next week. And so I just did all of this work on myself. And in the interim of talking to my mom or not, I would reflect on like, okay, this now I understand a little bit more about my mom in this way. And a little bit more of her story from this piece.

Lisa Mitchell (31:17)
Yeah.

Rachel (31:31)
and I started piecing together my mother's experience when she left us when I was at an age that there is no way in hell I would have had any perspective on her experience. So now we are like a year ago or maybe two years ago, I was telling a friend about my mom leaving and I uttered the words,

Lisa Mitchell (31:43)
Right. Yeah.

Rachel (31:58)
actually learned how to break generational trauma from my mom. And I was like, whoa, wait, where did that come from? Because I feel awfully like she created new drama and trauma. But it gave me pause because I said it in a moment where I was like excited. I was talking to this friend about horses because she left the family to go, you know, be with a man that owned the horse farm that she boarded her new horse at.

Lisa Mitchell (32:08)
Ha

Rachel (32:27)
There was a whole bunch of stuff around horses for 20 years. But I told this friend, I was like, I learned how to be like a no-nonsense, I'm gonna do what I wanna do and get myself out of situations that are suffocating me from my mom. And that was a big turning point because then I told my mom that.

Lisa Mitchell (32:29)
wow. my god. Yeah.

Rachel (32:52)
and she said, I have no illusions about being a great mother or like what I did. I know what I did. And that was like the final piece of me being able to receive her ownership without being like, ha, gotcha. Because people are always trying to like pigeonhole each other in to some type of ownership. Like you need to blank. But I never did that.

Lisa Mitchell (33:11)
right.

Right.

Rachel (33:18)
I took it upon myself to evaluate all of this stuff on my own, which was a fuck ton of work. I'm not saying that this was easy, but it also took 20 years.

Lisa Mitchell (33:26)
No, I, we, we've talked

about, I say you've been, we've been talking about this journey. I remember when you're I talked to my mom and I'm my God, how did it go? And you're like, we're going to talk again. And I'm like, wow. that's, mean, from even our initial conversation, when you shared, you know, one of our initial conversations where you kind of shared some of your story to the point of Hey, we, talked and it wasn't terrible. was hard, but it wasn't terrible. And we'll probably do it again. It's like that's.

Rachel (33:33)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Lisa Mitchell (33:53)
an enormous chasm to jump, right?

Rachel (33:56)
Yeah,

and it took so long, but it's also one of these ideas that I've really tried to work on over the years of let results take time. People are in an instant gratification mode constantly, but communication knows no rules, knows no bounds like that.

and results in communication while there's instant ROI, that's a personal thing. Was I triggered every single time? No, at some point, no, because I tried something, I worked on it, I took a deep breath when she said something, I registered a trigger, I went through the internal representation process, registered a triggering tone, tact, inflection, word usage, it's so small, the way she looked at me funny.

Lisa Mitchell (34:33)
Right.

Rachel (34:48)
or something would set, used to set me off. And I was like, that is a thing, that is the trigger that I'm gonna pay attention to next time I interact with my mom, small things. And I would journal about it or I would just take note of it. And then the next time I'm in interaction with her, she's my mom, she's in her 60s, she's not changing. And that's where I turned all of that energy back on myself of like, she said that thing. I'm, okay, remember that thing I thought to do here is take a deep breath. And you're like, okay.

Lisa Mitchell (35:06)
Right.

Rachel (35:16)
Now what do do? Do I need to get out of the conversation or can I keep going? And that was my inner dialogue. like, yeah, I think we're okay. We can keep going. I was like, what do mean by that, mom? And then take on a little bit more. And then maybe I got worn down and she would say something else that triggered me and I'd like, ah, fresh out of patience here. So we'll pick this up next week or something.

So that's what I mean by incremental and the story with myself informing how I move forward.

Lisa Mitchell (35:46)
Yeah. So I think like, I'm just, keep putting myself in some of the conversations that I've had at different times where two things felt a little, a little convicting on that. And I don't, I don't know if anybody else can, can resonate with this or not, but like, we have been told that like, if you do a converse, if you just get the conversation right enough,

you only have to have it once, and then the thing is fixed. I think that that, when you said that, I was like, shit. yeah. yes. that's the expectation I have had in really difficult, tangly, emotionally charged, hurt-filled conversations is like, gosh, if I can just get this conversation right enough, it'll be fixed. And I think that's where, especially when you think about

people that are in high conflict relationships or high conflict marriages or high conflict co-parenting environments. you go in with the best of intentions and good energy and you're okay, I'm gonna do my best. And then this person is gonna respond this way. And then the second there's resistance or somebody doesn't stick to the script, you forgot to give them or you lose a little bit of your emotional regulation and you pop off or you escalate it.

Rachel (36:56)
Mm-hmm. ⁓

Lisa Mitchell (37:06)
You just throw it in the L column of screwed it up, I suck, I did it wrong, everything's ruined, back to the drawing board, right? Or you do feel good about it and you think, cool, we're good now. And then the same shit shows up in another conversation and you're well, why do I have to fix this again? I already did this once. So your point about letting results take time and looking at this as a

Rachel (37:18)
Mm-hmm.

Lisa Mitchell (37:33)
like a series, like it's like Netflix or Hulu, right? a no good show ever just been one episode, there's the continuation and the continued effort. And honestly, hearing you talk through how you navigated the level of understanding that you have about yourself and the experience with your mom, wears me out because of someone who is so

have all the communication skills in the world, but I do not have the endurance. I don't have the endurance. I don't have the emotional endurance. It is a quality of mind that I do not speak on often, and I am not proud of, but I do not have. I don't have the endurance. I'm working on building it, but I am much more a cut and run than I am a sit in it.

and revisit it kind of person. And again, there's lots of reasons for that, but you, your narrative around the process with your mom is challenging me in a very good way. And I'm sure challenging other people listening to this of just cutting the crap and being okay, well, how much effort and time

Rachel (38:25)
Yeah.

you

Lisa Mitchell (38:46)
and discipline are you having around these difficult conversations? And the answer for a lot of us, present company included, is probably not enough or not as much as it will take to get the outcome that I'm hoping for.

Lisa Mitchell (39:04)
again. Okay, so I should have known when I had Rachel Randolph on as a guest that we were gonna run exceptionally long. And so what you are gonna find is that you are not gonna have just one great episode to listen to with Rachel and I getting into all things communication and inner dialogue and managing triggers and all the things that she's already shared here in the first part of this series, but we're gonna go a whole lot deeper on a whole bunch of other things. So this is gonna be part one.

and a series of TBD episodes. I think we're still gonna record another one because she has some interesting updates, especially to tag on to the topics that we talked about in this first episode. I want you to like, subscribe, share, follow, comment, ⁓ keep up with this series because it only gets better from here. And until next time, stay curious, my friends.