#39 When Life Is Messy

We explore why life’s messiness catches us off guard and how shifting expectations and practicing surrender build true resilience. Stories from family, work, health, and finances ground a simple two-part framework to move through hardship without blame, guilt, or panic.

• redefining hidden expectations about “how life should be”
• common stressors across family, work, money, and health
• the childbirth analogy to normalize pain with purpose
• avoiding blame, shame, and comparison that compound pain
• resilience through mindset shifts and trust-filled surrender
• hope without doom, boundaries without becoming a doormat
• holding both suffering and joy as equals

If you have any questions or would like to go deeper into this topic or how it affects you in your own life, you can find me at SharonKcoaching.com. If you've enjoyed listening, please subscribe and leave a review on your favorite platform. And feel free to share with anyone you think might benefit from what you've heard.

Click the link below to set up a free discovery call to begin your transformation today.  Or email me @ smurph923.sm@gmail.com to find out more about how I can help.  

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Transcript

Welcome And Purpose

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Hello and welcome to my podcast. My name is Sharon Murphy and I'm a certified life and mindset coach and I help women who seek to be happy and holy. Each week I'll bring you tools and insights to help you on your journey to the heights. I'm so glad you're here. Have you ever found yourself during a season of life where you just thought, what is going on? Why am I why am I getting hit left and right? Why does it feel like life is harder than it should be? Maybe you're in that season right now. As someone who helps women pursue a life, live a life of abundance, I want to address something that's a little less empowering, but is, I believe, really, really important and impactful. Now, no one no one likes to talk about this, especially me, but I believe we're hindering our ability to live full and abundant lives when we fail to properly consider what it is that our life should look like. And by that I mean what is it that we expect of our lives? Now, I think it's pretty fair to say that for any new parent who welcomes a child into their lives, they have very high ideals of what that's going to look like for that child, right? They have all the things that they're going to do and not do to ensure that everything goes perfectly, that they do everything perfectly. And sometimes even in our own woundedness, if we're honest, that our kids turn out perfectly. This can be true even for those of us who don't have kids. Maybe you're newly married or you've just graduated and you're setting out into adulthood with all of these plans, hopes, and dreams. All good things and all very normal, perfectly normal. But what happens when life happens? And by life happens, I mean when things don't go as we had planned. When everything doesn't play out exactly like we had thought it would. And that can be things, you know, our relationships. That's that's a big one. Our kids, maybe it's their own struggles in their own lives that we weren't anticipating. Could be at school or with their friendships. We've all been there. If we have children that we've raised or are raising, we know how hard that can be for us to work through that with them. It could be problems when the relationships within your own home, within your kids, maybe that as siblings, maybe they don't get along like we thought they would. This isn't what we expected. We thought that somehow our family would be this tight-knit, close bond relationship family, and it's not happening that way. Maybe there's health crisis that one or more of you are experiencing. In our marriages, those relationships, they certainly don't always go as we had thought. When we said I do, and we set out, yes, we understood, we said for better or for worse, but a lot of times we think, but we weren't expecting this. And how many times have we been told that you can't change your spouse, so on and so forth, and yet somehow there's a part of us that thought maybe we could, or that they would change, or maybe they changed along the way for various reasons, and all of a sudden we're dealing with issues within our marriage. And it's true that when we say I do, we really don't have an idea of what's coming. And there's highs and lows in marriages. We all know this. There's betrayals, there's financial struggles, there's health struggles. Also within our families as adults. We now have different ideas about things within our siblings. You know, say you're an adult and you have siblings. Those ties that you had when you're younger, they sort of pull further apart. We're now living our own lives. And so sometimes there's problems within those relationships. We also have issues at work. The challenges of working with other people in those relationships. We work with people day in and day out, and we're all wired very differently. We have very different hopes, dreams, expectations, personalities. We carry some baggage from our past that doesn't allow us to show up as our best selves. We bring the trials from our homes, our home lives. We carry those into our work lives. We're integrated beings. So what's happening in our personal lives, we bring into the workplace. So these are just some examples of the way that turns up in our lives. We're human beings. We make mistakes. Others make mistakes. We hurt each other intentionally and unintentionally. And naturally, because of this, we experience pain and suffering and woundedness in our relationships. Now, other ways when I'm talking about life happening is in our finances. The struggles are differing in opinions we have about our finances and money. Maybe a lack of finances or how to manage them. We all have different backgrounds, we have different ideas about what that should look like. There's also breakdowns in our home. We have things that break down, furnace goes out, the house needs repairs. There's things with our automobiles. You need new tires. Maybe there's a problem with the engine. Things that we're not always expecting and maybe don't show up at the best time for us. There's a loss of job. Those can be things that get thrown at us. Then there's issues with our health, right? Medical illnesses or accidents, you know, that turn our world upside down. Now all of these things are a part of our lives in some way or another, and in varying degrees and at different times. But they are the reality of our lives. But all of these are sources of our angst, or I would say the culprits of what I would refer to as a messy life. Yes, they disrupt our lives, but they are true for every one of us. They are part of our experiences. So why do these things have so much power to take us out? Why are we so shocked when they occur? Well, I believe, and this is just my own personal opinion, but that we are living in a time where we are less equipped to handle the messiness, the messiness of life than in the past. And again, it's just my opinion. Why do I think this is? Well, I think we've gotten into this lie or this ideology that life should be simple or easy. You know, we have the ability to work, earn, achieve our way to some sort of utopia here on earth. And sure, we certainly have a fair amount of agency over the quality of our lives. Absolutely, which is exactly what I aim to help people with. I want them to understand the power that they have to affect their life in a positive way. But the problem that I see is that we start to believe we can outrun or outsmart these things altogether. And then when these things happen to us in our lives and our relationships and our finances, in our health, at you know, the relationships at home or at work or wherever we may be, then we wonder what has happened, which leads us to feeling like a victim, and then resorts to blame. Or the opposite, which is judgment towards ourself, which leads us to guilt or shame. And neither is helpful. So what do I think that we need to do about this? Well, I just want to offer you this. What if you just accepted that these things are a natural part of life? What if you didn't hold any judgment whatsoever? If you knew that this is what life is about, and you could just continue to move throughout your days with a sense of peace, knowing that this is normal, that life is just messy. Yours is messy, mine is messy. And I know that this sounds hard to do, and in in truth it is. It is hard, but it's possible. And as I said earlier, I I believe that earlier generations in past times, they've endured hardships that we're not akin to. They were able to handle things like this that we're not able to. Like, for example, this is just something that came is coming to my mind, and I don't know if this is a great example or not, but hopefully you can understand what I'm trying to get at by this. But the fact that, you know, many children died at birth or shortly after. There was a time when that was very common. Look at the number of women, as recent as the late 19th century or early 20th century, probably even, that lost multiple children when you read stories about it. Somebody will say, you know, they had 12 kids and five made it to adulthood or something like that. I've read many stories like that. They would lose multiple children during birth or as young children. And in our time, we couldn't even fathom this. That would be so far out of our ability to even comprehend. That would be horrific. And it is horrific. It is horrific. But that's just an example. But I think that that's kind of an idea of what it is for all the areas of our lives today is that we live in a time because we have so many modern conveniences, praise God, but it has also created for us an idea that we can live a life without any hardships at all, that we can avoid it altogether. I mean, even just look at our health. And it's great the advances that we're we're getting to. It's fantastic. I think it's a wonderful thing. But somehow there's this idea that we can just live forever, that we have just tried to defy the fact that we're going to die. That's just an example again. But that we think that we can live a life without hardships or trials altogether, that we can avoid it if we just do all the right things. I just think that that that can be harmful to us because then we don't know how to handle when things are thrown at us that that is just part of our normal lives, which is what I mean by the messiness of life. So the question is if I'm suggesting that what if we could just accept this? What if we just understood this was part of it? So how do we do that? How do we get better at this? Well, I think there's two things that are absolutely necessary, two things that will allow us to become more resilient in the face of hardships. And the first one is our expectations, which really is about our mindset. Our mindset and what we expect is huge when it comes to how we face or adapt to adversity. I just want to give you this example of what this looks like and what I mean by this about our expectations and our mindset. So for example, now imagine if you're a female, and I think most of my listeners are, and if you've had children, you'll understand this even better. But imagine that you were never told that childbirth would be painful. If you believe that you just carried this child for nine months and then this child just mysteriously appeared without any pain or suffering. Now, I know. I know that seems hard to even fathom because we're fully aware of what comes at the end of the nine months through labor and delivery, but just try and imagine that. That this is what that was our reality. So imagine how you would react when you began to experience those contractions at nine months when you went through the, you know, 12 or 30 hours of labor pains, whatever it might have been for you. Imagine how much differently you would react. But because we know, because we're told, at least, you know, on some level, that there will be pain, sometimes large amounts of pain, right? But we we learn this and we know this, so we expect it. We don't look forward to it, we don't minimize it, but we just accept it as part of the process. This is what it is. We just know that this is this is part of what having a child is, and we know it's worth it. We know that in the end we have this child and we understand what the fruit of that pain and suffering is. We just accept it. So this is how our mindset and our expectations can impact, how we face the challenges of our lives. If we didn't know that that was part of what was coming in labor, or you know, as our in pregnancy, you know, imagine how much differently, how much, how much we'd resist, how much we'd fight, how much panic there would be of what's happening, what's happening now? But when you know that that's part of it, again, we don't have to love it, we don't have to look forward to it, but we just accept it. That's I th that's what I'm offering that we can do with the hardness or the messiness of our lives, with all the things that happen. And part of that is we're remembering that this life is going to be filled with challenges and trials, that perfect harmony is not possible for us, at least not at this time, right? That's reserved for us in the next life. So changing what we expect is super powerful. Because when we see these things as just a normal part of life, we're gonna be far less disoriented or thrown off when they come. And even if we feel those punches, you know, when they happen and we get thrown off initially, of course, because we're just going about life and when things get thrown at us, it will throw us off. At least they won't knock us out if we can kind of gather ourselves and realize that this is just part of it. And we adjust and we move on. Now, again, the other thing is this is not to say that we live in a state of doom and gloom where we expect the other shoe to drop at any time, or that we expect everyone, you know, we're on the defense of that people might hurt us or betray us. This isn't helpful and it robs us of any joy in the present moment. That's not what we want. We need to always maintain hope in all of our circumstances. And even though we may be let down by others or or life may hand us challenges and what sometimes feel repeated, we know that our hope doesn't disappoint. And we know that because the next key to resilience and handling the messiness of life is surrender. To be able to surrender, we must have trust. Surrender and trust. Our expectations, the first key, is part of mindset. So our mindset is the issue there and managing our expectations. And here, when we're talking about surrender, we need to have trust. What do we do when we experience difficulties of all kinds or setbacks, when they're upon us, when they're here? Once we've processed what's happened, we we take that blow and we allow ourselves to experience whatever it is that's happened to us, whatever we're going through, then the next step is to surrender. Surrender the situation and the outcome to God. Let him, who is the creator of all, creator of everything around us, the creator of all of us, let him guide us through it. We trust that he is with us through it all, and then we move forward in our days. Is this simple? It sounds simple. I don't know that it's that simple. Is it easy? No, no, it's not. But it's a practice, and it will get easier the more that you trust and surrender. It's something that you can put into place and practice it. So when we shift our expectations and we manage our mindset around this, around our lives and what they should look like, along with surrendering everything to God and trusting in him when our hardships do occur, this is the formula for resilience. And don't we all want to be resilient? Let's remember resilience is only required during times of adversity. We don't need to be resilient if everything is going smoothly. And I think there's a lack of resilience in our world, as I talked about earlier, just because we sort of had this expectation that we can we can outsmart all the bad things that might happen. If we just get enough things right, if we do all the right things, that we won't have to experience that. And so if we acknowledge that life is messy, then resilience is the antidote. And it isn't to say that we become doormats. So just to address this to the betrayals and assaults of others, no. We always protect ourselves emotionally and of course physically, and we set appropriate boundaries for sure. But the danger that so many of us fall into, and I see this, is comparing ourselves to others, telling ourselves that what we're experiencing or what we've experienced is worse or far worse than what others are experiencing, which only adds to our pain and suffering. Think about it. It just adds to it. We're already undergoing some of the trials and the difficulties of life. But then when we start to go to that place of nobody else is having this, why is this happening to me? Or I'm experiencing this and I shouldn't be, it only adds to our pain and suffering. But if we could really grasp the fact that we all experience this messiness in varying forms and at differing times, like I said, but if we understand that all of us experience this, we can at least avoid that piling on of the added weight of what we're already experiencing. The weight of like this shouldn't be happening, which I said earlier only leads to blame. Blaming of others, right? If something's happening in our lives, we blame others. We can blame our spouse, we can blame our children, we can blame our coworkers, we can blame any number of things. We can blame the guy that's driving next to us on the highway. But all that does is place us as victims, and then it already compounds the already difficult situation that we're experiencing. So just let's this came to my mind, you know. Let's think about it. We always hear this that misery loves company. And it's true, even though most of us don't want to admit it. It's true. But why is it? Well, it because it makes us feel like we're not alone when we're struggling in some area. Like it isn't just us who's going through whatever it is we're going through. Or we can find evidence that maybe it isn't, it isn't our fault, that we've not done something wrong to have brought this upon ourselves, that we're not unique, we're not this unicorn. But the truth is that we're all going through something, every one of us. If you if you take nothing else from what I'm talking about today, just remember that piece right there, because that will help you, that will provide you some comfort. Is that you'll likely never see what's happening in other people's lives, what's going on around you, but it's there. And how do I know that? Well, because life is messy, that's why. And because I've had the pleasure of coaching so many amazing people who are struggling, struggling with something. And in addition to the struggling, whether that's in their marriage, in their relationships, in their parenting, in their own habits or addictions, or that of loved ones, or in their insecurities and doubts, in addition to all of these, there is almost always the confused, powerless question that's present, which is sounds something like, why is this happening? What did I do wrong? Why me? And in the the answer in most cases is just life is messy. That's why. As I leave you today, if you're currently feeling like you're in the trenches, just know you're not alone. Those around you have been in the trenches themselves, or they'll be there at some other appointed time. This is the reality of our lives. The idea that your life shouldn't be this way, that you shouldn't be going through hardship, while it may feel true to you and you might find evidence for that, it isn't helping you move through it. Remembering that it's just a part of our lives here on earth and that we can find comfort in knowing that it isn't our fault, we aren't to blame, and that sometimes life is just messy. It just is. But as much as we need to expect that life can be messy, we need to remember that the opposite is true. Just as love and fear both exist, so do pain and joy. So does suffering and elation. As important as it is to expect and accept the messiness, it's just as important to expect and accept the happiness and the joy. That's just as much a part of this life. So, as always, thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you have an amazing week. And I hope that even if life is messy right now, you're able to find some joy on the journey. And until next time, onward and upward, my friends, to the heights. Thanks so much for listening today. If you have any questions or would like to go deeper into this topic or how it affects you in your own life, you can find me at SharonKcoaching.com. That's Sharon the LetterK Coaching.com. If you've enjoyed listening, please subscribe and leave a review on your favorite platform. And feel free to share with anyone you think might benefit from what you've heard.