And the more I manage my brain and study how the brain works and really study people who get a lot done in not a lot of time, which is my goal. My goal is to have a very full life but not have it feel busy and rushed. 

So I like to study people who live like that, and they just make decisions quickly because they know that all the time that we spend thinking about it. None of that really matters. I mean, really hear this ’cause it’s kind of will stretch your brain to think about it. None of that really matters because you’re gonna sit down at one moment and you’re gonna go, “All right. Fine. I’ve just decided,” and then you’re gonna move on. 

The decision actually takes, I’m just gonna say 30 seconds, where you just get into the place where you just decide. And I’m not saying we shouldn’t spend any time thinking about things, but you will give yourself as much time to think about it as you allow. You will give yourself as many days as you want to think about it. 

And I hadn’t actually been sitting and chewing on the school thing for a long time, like a lot of minutes in my mind. But it was in the background of my mind. And I wasn’t doing anything to help me make the decision, and so I just sat down and went, “Oh, we’re just deciding today.” And I just thought about it, and I decided, and I moved forward. 

And it’s great. Since I’ve done that, I can feel that that loop got closed in my brain. And I’ve mentioned this before, that I think one of the things that’s stressful for moms is how many open loops we have. 

And, you know. What did my daughter ask me yesterday? Yesterday she asked me something. Oh my gosh, I feel like it was about the fall. Anyway, she asked me something that was not relevant today, not relevant to this month. There was nothing we could do about it. It was something months from now.

And other things needed to happen in order for me to even have the information to make the decision. I can’t believe I don’t remember what it is, but I do remember thinking that. And I said to her so kindly, I was like, “Hey, I love you. My brain can only hold so much information at once. This thing is not something we need to talk about until three months from now.” 

And I said, “I would love to talk to you about it, I would love to think about it with you, but we’re not gonna do that for three months.” And that was me closing a loop for her. Just close that loop. Even if you know that you’re gonna have to open it again later, it doesn’t need to be open now. 

And isn’t that what we do as moms? We just kind of like open loops and let 15 loops, maybe 35 loops be open in your brain. And it takes a certain amount of subconscious energy, if you think of your brain as a computer, some sort of processing power, to keep those open.

So I want you to think about that. And on Saturdays. I love Saturdays, I love Mondays. Those are, like, my jam. On Saturdays, I try to close as many loops as I can, and I wake up Saturday morning, and I’m like, “What can we close? What can we knock out? What can I decide? What can we figure out?”

And then Mondays just feel like a new chapter for me. I’m like, “Ooh, we’re gonna start fresh. We’re gonna do whatever habit I wanna work on, whatever routine we’re working toward.” I just really like Mondays as a reset day. So you can borrow that if you want. Saturdays we close as many loops as we can. So I closed that loop with the girls, which was great. 

The other thing I have been enjoying this summer, which is unusual for me because normally it’s my winter cozy thing, is drinking tea and doing puzzles and listening to audiobooks, and I just love doing that. I love it so much.

I have a board, which is just plywood that’s the size of a puzzle so that I can do a puzzle and then put it up somewhere. Okay, you can’t leave puzzles around if you have children. You know this. 

So I just finished this delightful puzzle. I will put it in the chat. It was just a giant octopus in the sea. I don’t know why it tickled my brain so much, but it really did. It was, like, mostly blue and white, so it was kind of hard, really stretched my brain, and it was just beautiful, and I loved it. 

And then I will listen to an audiobook while I do that. This book that I just finished is not gonna be for a lot of you. Okay? So just, you know, you need to know yourself. When somebody makes a book recommendation, you need to know yourself.

Like, some of you like Amish romance, and that’s just not for me. Okay? I don’t care how much you loved it, it’s just not gonna be my jam. Okay? I don’t love books about Western things maybe. I don’t know that any of you are reading Westerns, but in my mind it was, like, picturing a book, and there’s, like, a cowboy and a horse on it. I’m like, “Nope, I’m just probably never gonna read that.” 

But I really like British books and very witty books, and so I just read Rook by something O’Malley. Definitely some swearing in it, I will say that. It was so good though. I really enjoyed it. So if you’re not into and just go read the description of the book, and you’ll just have a body reaction where you’re like, “That sounds amazing,” or not. But I really enjoyed it. It was very witty. It was very intense. 

So I’m listening to that and I’m doing my puzzles, and I’m drinking my tea. Also, I have probably used AI the most for household stuff. It’s really funny. I really thought I would use it a ton in my business, but it’s really mostly been household stuff.

So I asked it. I got a bag of vanilla Equip protein. You guys know I love Equip protein, and we always just get chocolate. We get two bags of chocolate every month, and there was a promotion or something. I don’t know. I ended up with a bag of vanilla, and vanilla’s not normally my favorite flavor. 

But I went to the AI robots, as I call them, and I said, “Oh, what kind of tea would vanilla protein powder be good in?” Because I do the chocolate protein powder in mint, but in my mind, like mint and vanilla didn’t sound great. 

So it said Earl Grey tea or cinnamon tea. So I had both of those teas. I have both caffeinated Earl Grey and decaf Earl Grey ’cause I love that flavor so much, and it is amazing. Okay? I make decaf Earl Grey tea, and then I put a scoop of vanilla Equip protein, which has 20 grams of protein powder, no sugar. It’s just made out of beef. I don’t understand what magical food fairies they have that do that, but it’s pretty great. 

And so I’m just like drinking my protein tea listening to an audiobook and doing puzzles. And we’ve had kind of a cool June, so we’ve had several rainy days, and I think that’s why. I think as soon as we click into the 80s, then my brain’ll be like, “Oh, it is definitely not puzzle and tea season.”

But, it’s been not very hot here, and so I feel like I’m still just like pretending, maybe pulling in September energy, and that’s what I’ve been doing, and it’s been really fun. So as soon as it gets hot-hot, then I will be waking up early. I try to walk in the mornings before it gets really hot, so I haven’t clicked over to do that yet, but I will soon.

Let’s see. I bought a bunch of audiobooks for the kids, but probably all of them are just on Sarah Mackenzie’s read-aloud revival lists. So you can go to her website and look at her lists. Her lists are free. You can go check those out. 

It is really fun though, having a 15-year-old and now sharing older books with her, like adult books with her, that are appropriate, and getting to talk to her about them. I’m really enjoying that. We are getting a puppy. Did I say that? I must have said that. We are getting a puppy on June 22nd. The puppy lands, and it is a red golden retriever, a field line retriever. 

So not a big fluffy golden retriever, is kind of what you’re probably picturing. This is smaller and sleeker, red. It’s a hunting dog, like a bird hunting dog. It looks more like a Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever, which maybe only you nerdy dog people would know, but I do love those dogs. Looks more like that. 

So my 12-year-old is getting this dog, and it’s been so fun to talk about dog training with her. I bought her a dog training program online, and I said, “Go through this, ask me questions.” She still doesn’t think it’s gonna be hard. It’s so cute. She’s like, “It’s gonna be so fun.” And I can tell she just is thinking of the fun things and not all the hard things, but it doesn’t matter. I’m gonna let her figure that out. 

And she has this long list of names, which is really fun. And I, the only rule I had was that it has to end phonetically in an E sound, okay? I like dogs whose names end with E, like Lily and Ruby and Brinkley and Barkley. Like, I like that. Two syllables, could be three, but I like two syllables, ends in an E sound. I don’t know, that’s just my preference for dog names. 

So she’s getting a puppy. Okay, I already know some of you are gonna ask me what that dog training program was, and I know. spiritdogtraining.com. Spirit Dog Training. I don’t love that name, but she was the kind of trainer that I wanted, which is a clicker trainer and a positive reinforcement trainer. Which is the kind of trainer that I am. 

Did I tell you last week about reading The Letter From Beyond? I don’t know if I had read it yet. The Letter From Beyond I’ll put a link down below because it’s public domain, so you can find it on lots and lots of websites. It was this letter from a woman who went to hell. 

Like, this woman went to hell permanently, and I think God asked her to write a letter to her Catholic friend who was still alive telling her about hell and why people go to hell. It was really powerful. Pretty short, like you could read it in half an hour, I think. 

And the biggest thing I took away from it was, one, that I think holy water is probably more powerful than I had been thinking it was. So I don’t know. She says something about holy water, and it just made me be like, “Oh.” I think I just take it for granted is the point. You know, we just, we go into the church, and we do the holy water, and we just take it for granted, I think. 

So I’ve been thinking about that, and we need to replace that in our house. Like, we ran out of holy water, and I wanna replace it in the font that we have and then do it with the kids every day ’cause it’s so easy just not to do that. But her letter really changed my impression of that. 

And then the other thing was she talked about how often God would give her signal graces and, and prompt her to do something, and she would just not do it. And I thought about that for all of us, that how often is God kind of nudging our heart in a certain direction, and then we don’t listen.

And then that happened to me on Friday. It was the solemnity of the Sacred Heart, and we went to Mass, and I had this feeling before we went that so many people were gonna come that we wouldn’t fit in the side chapel, which is where they do daily Mass, that we would need to be in the big church. 

And I had this feeling, and I thought about telling Geraldine, the church lady manager, then I just forgot, and I didn’t do it. And sure enough, there were people standing in the back because there wasn’t enough room in the chapel, and I remember kicking myself and being like, “Yeah, that was, I think, like, a signal grace.” Like, hey, God was prompting me to do something, and I just didn’t do it. 

So I’m not talking about, like, huge things necessarily, like world-changing things, and I don’t think if we don’t do it that we’re gonna go to hell. That’s not at all what I mean. I don’t mean, like, the stakes are that high, but I just think if we sit with the still, small voice in our hearts, that we get a lot more of these signals from the Lord, and we can listen to them and participate in life with Him. And something about the letter just kinda made me think about that.

Okay. That’s what’s going on with me. My family’s about to leave to go on their annual camping trip, and I’m going to keep recording the Calm Catholic Kids stories for you guys. The Kindness Collection is out. Collection four and five are coming soon. Oh my goodness, I’m so excited.

It’s  summer  themed, so it’s like little Dymphna is scared to go swimming, and little Gabriel has trouble standing in line, and Felix the Fox is so bored, and Sebastian the Squirrel is struggling to tie his shoes, ’cause we’re working on that with two of my boys right now.

What else? Repairing with a sibling. That’s a good one. Oh, Marie spends the night at her grandmother’s house and is scared to sleep somewhere else. So I know some of you want that story and the practice track because your kids are gonna be sleeping somewhere new this summer, and you wanna prepare them for that. So those collections are coming. They’re super cute. I’m very excited about them. 

And then I’m also, the week that my kids are gone, I’m gonna be recording meditations for you guys, where it’s like, as I’m doing these kids stories, I totally see how we need the same thing. So it’s like if your feelings are hurt, you need a sterling track where I’m just like, “Hey, my friend, I’m so glad you’re here.” That’s what I say in the practice track.

And I just talk you through it, and obviously I’m not gonna talk to you like you’re three. I’m gonna talk to you like you’re 40. But I really see now how I wanna do that, and so I’m gonna record some of those. ‘Cause the Catholic Mom Calm app that’s coming has a lot of prayers in it, but this is different. But this is like a calm down track for moms around certain topics. 

So I’m gonna do that, and it’s gonna be great. All right. Here’s my coaching thought for you today. I coached a lot of people this last week. It was just… I don’t know. I was just in a lot of coaching rooms coaching a lot of women.

And one of the things that jumped out to me- Is this question: do we actually want our lives to be better? And I know on the surface we all wanna say, “Yes, of course, Sterling, I want my life to be better,” right? But let’s really think about it, because. And let me just use losing weight as an example. A lot of women will say, “I wanna lose weight.” And then I will say, “Okay, here’s what you have to do to lose weight.”

And then your brain goes, “Well, I don’t wanna do that.” I’m like, “Okay, you don’t have to.” But then we know that you don’t want to lose weight enough to do those things, which is fine. It’s not good or bad, it’s just what it takes, right? 

And I think there’s something similar around choosing to redirect your brain and letting go of things. And the truth for a lot of us is that we just don’t want to. So we walk around saying, “I’m unhappy, I’m stressed, life is hard,” and it’s kinda has like a pouty summer kid like, “Oh, I’m so bored,” right? We’re like, “Oh, everything’s so hard, and the kids, and the noise.”

And I know exactly how you can get out of that. Exactly. I could take any person with any problem, and I could step them through the psychological things that they would need to do to make their life better. Some of those steps might include changing the thing in their life, and some of it might not, right?

There’s some amount of acceptance that just has to happen around having a three-year-old or a 15-year-old or a 22-year-old who’s not going to mass, right? There are some things where we can take a practical step in our life that then changes what’s happening in our lives, or we can’t. Like, you just have a three-year-old, and three-year-olds have big feelings, and you have to redirect your brain to accept that you have a three-year-old with big feelings.

But I wanna zoom out and just say, do you even wanna do that? Do you want to do the work of paying attention to your thinking and redirecting your brain so that your life is better? And I want you to have kind of like a stare in the mirror moment about this. Do you want to change? And instead of thinking about your whole life, do you want your whole life to be better, you can just think about one aspect of it.

For example, you could say, “Oh my gosh, my kids, there’s so much sibling bickering.” And we definitely feel like victims to that, don’t we? And I did too, a little bit. And then that’s when I had that big moment about, oh, kindness is a skill, and I could teach it, and why don’t I just go research it and start teaching it to the kids?

And that felt so empowering. But I could’ve stayed there. I could’ve stayed in the place where I went, “Oh, it’s just so hard, and I have six kids, and they talk all the time, and why do they still bicker and.” Right? Like, my brain could’ve stayed there. 

But the work I had to do wasn’t actually researching kindness and putting the program together and practicing with the kids. The first step was just believing that I could redirect my brain and enjoy my life better. That’s the first thing you have to get to. 

Do you think that you can redirect your brain and enjoy your life better? I got an email from someone recently, and she listed five things. It was like, parents are coming to visit. She was relocating, and she was sad about leaving a really amazing community, and she liked her reasons for moving. I think it was her husband had a job opportunity. 

But she was like, “I’m so sad about all my friends.” She was worried about hurting her daughter in the ways that her mother had hurt her. So she was noticing that she was kind of continuing this pattern and was really worried about it, and then had some thoughts about sending the daughter to school or not. I feel like there were five things. I can’t remember them all. 

And she took the time to write them all out, and she understands the work that I do. She’s been a member with us for a while. And she said, “It’s just so much, and it’s so overwhelming, and where do I start?” 

And I wrote back and I said, “Do you believe that you can pay attention to your thinking and redirect your mind to think better thoughts to enjoy your life more?” That just has to be step one. And we know that sometimes we would rather be mad. Sometimes we would rather be sad. Sometimes we would rather hold on to the injustice of something and feel bitter about it

I often coach on an uneven distribution of tasks between husbands and wives. I’m usually coaching the wife. So the wife is usually like, “I do so much more than my husband. He doesn’t see. He doesn’t appreciate it,” or, “If I don’t do these things, then they just don’t get done.” Some sort of inequity there that she perceives.

And I know that the answer is she can totally change her thinking about that. She can just think, “I love how capable I am. I’m so powerful. I love having a clean house or a clean bedroom or whatever it is. It’s totally fine that my husband over there doesn’t value those things.” 

And she could clean up her own thinking, but it would require her to let go of this concept of things being equal, and she’d have to let go of feeling any sense of justice there. Like, “Oh, this isn’t right. It isn’t fair.” 

And I know that the truth for some of us is that we just actually don’t wanna let it go. We would rather be bitter than change our minds to enjoy our lives better. Just really sit with that. It’s so true. All of us are doing it in some area of our life where we have the power to change how we think about it and be happier, for sure, or more content. But we actually don’t want to.

And I’m not even saying that you should, but I will tell you that thinking you want something and feeling powerless, that feels worse than just acknowledging, “I’m kinda mad about this, and I wanna stay mad about this for a little bit longer.”

Just think about that for a minute. Or let’s just go back to the weight example. Like, you know what? I just don’t feel like doing the things that I would have to do to lose weight right now, and that’s okay. I still love myself. I’m still a human that’s worthy of being loved just because God created me, and this is just the truth of where I’m at right now.

And I will just tell you that for me, seeing the truth of knowing that I could do something and I’m choosing not to is less painful than believing that I’m trapped or stuck or can’t do something that I want.

So I just think it’s a really worthy question, which is do you want to redirect your brain. So that you enjoy your life more. You’d have to let some things go. Now, I don’t think that our goal should ever be happiness all the time and positive, cheery feelings. That’s not what I’m talking about. Your brain is still gonna give you negative thoughts. They’re gonna pop up, but you get to then decide what to do after they pop up. 

So you might wake up in the morning and go, “I’m feeling stressed about school in the fall.” And then in that moment, you can notice, “Oh my brain is having some thoughts about school.” I like to schedule time in the calendar to think about that like, “Oh, but on Saturday morning we’re gonna think about it and we’re gonna decide. So we don’t need to worry about it right now, brain.

And the other thing you can do is tell yourself how it’s going to be great. The brain naturally looks for ways that it’s gonna be terrible, but you can think about how it’s gonna be great. So for this woman who was moving and gonna miss her friends, I said, “Yeah, absolutely. Of course you’re gonna miss your friends.” I said, “But what are 50 things that could be great about this move? 50.” 

And if you set your brain to thinking about how it could be amazing. How do you think your day is gonna change walking around thinking about that? I was talking to somebody else who was gonna take a trip, and she was gonna go visit her mom with the kids. And there were some things there that she was worried about, and they seemed like valid things. 

But I said, “Why are you going? What, what is amazing about you going? What is fun about you going? Why do you value this?” And she lit up, and she told me all these things. I’m like, “Yeah, let’s just walk around thinking about those things. ‘Cause for sure you are gonna go, and your mom is gonna be critical of your parenting style. We already know that. It’s fine. 

But you’re going for the amazing things. Let’s just think about those” And you might say, “Sterling, it sounds like you’re being in denial about things,” but no. You dreading something that’s coming and just chewing on it, it’s not even strategic thinking. I think that’s really unhelpful. Why are we doing that? I would rather just think about what’s amazing. 

Now, I’m very into problem-solving. You guys know that. So for me, I’d sit down and I’d think about, can I mitigate any of the things that could come up that I don’t like? Can I plan it? Can I create protocols? What boundaries do I wanna think about ahead of time while I’m calm? I’m doing all of those things, but when I’m walking around in my life, I’m thinking about how things are going to go well. 

And by the way, that is not my natural state. I think all of you know that by now. That is not my natural state. My brain is like, everything is terrible. Nobody likes your face. Everything’s gonna crash and burn and be over. 

My brain is very dramatic and melancholic. We should have been a poet who dressed all in black. Deep inside I feel that way. But I just don’t allow myself to stay there. I redirect my brain, and I say, “Hey, brain, I hear you totally, but what if it’s amazing? But what are we looking forward to today? What do we love about our life right now?” 

It is very known how to do this. So my question is, why aren’t we all doing it? Or why aren’t you doing it in one area that feels painful right now? Why are you choosing to feel disempowered in an area of your life right now? 

And listen, that’s painful to hear. When you’re in a lot of pain and somebody says to you, “Why are you choosing to be in a lot of pain?” That can feel really jarring. But I really want you to sit with that because there’s clean pain. Oh, I’m sure I have a podcast episode about this. 

There’s clean pain, which is the kind of pain we want to feel, right? When somebody passes away, we want to feel sad. We want to feel grief. That’s clean. But then there’s dirty pain, which is stewing and spinning and chewing and chewing and ruminating and confusion and worry and anxiety and, like, this, like, spinning in your mind.

And that is not ever necessary, and we have control over that, and you can save yourself from that kind of pain. Do you want to? Do you want to enjoy the experience of your life more than you are right now? 

And if the answer is yes, go listen to this whole podcast. I was trying to find an episode, and there were so many episodes that I just gave up. I was like, “I don’t know where that episode is.” And then I was like, “Sterling, you have been podcasting for a long time.” 

But that’s the best news for you ever because you can go all the way back and listen to all of it and change your life. And if you wanna do it with other moms, come join Catholic Mom Calm. That is what we do. 

Every week, we just bring up the brain’s tantrums about regular life stuff, and then we choose to think about it differently. And every woman who gets coached, she walks away feeling more powerful because the thing that God wants us to control is our internal state, our emotional state, and the devil has twisted that and has tried to get us to control external things.

The devil tries to trick us to be hyper controlling about calendars and schedules and chore charts and, and rules, and if we just manage all these things, then we can feel okay. But you could never manage the external things. You can’t. 

God wants you to manage your mind so you choose inner peace, true inner peace, and I really believe that that’s possible in 100% of the moments, and that’s always what we should be striving for. All right, my friends. It was a lot, but I wanted to say all those things to you. 

Okay. Summer of Kindness kids’ stories are free and out. I think it will be one more week until the app comes out. It’s actually been quite hard to get Apple to approve a kid app, ’cause we’ve done a couple apps before, but this kid one, which I’m glad about, by the way, I’m glad that they have really strict requirements for apps for kids. I think that’s great. 

But you will definitely know when that is ready. In the meantime, you can get the MP3s and play them on your phone or on a Yoto or a Tonie. You can do it all those other ways, but I really want it to be on an app ’cause I think that’ll be one of the easiest ways that you can experience them.

All right. I am praying for you. Please pray for me. Thank you so much for listening, and have a blessed day.