And every single email that I read, I remember thinking, “Oh, I could help her feel a ton better about that.Oh, she could totally clean this up. She could have so much peace around this,” for all the problems. And I have an idea about what I’m gonna teach in the fall. You’re gonna have to wait to find out.

But I wanted to record this episode just to say that understanding your thinking and choosing how you think about something is the skill. It’s the number one skill. That’s it. It’s the number one skill. Seeing how you think of something and changing how you think of something until you feel how you want to feel.

We think that all the things around us are causing pain in our body, whether it’s anxiety or overwhelm or worry or frustration, and there were some very real things that people emailed me about.

But in the way that they wrote their emails, I could tell that they were thinking about the thing in a way that was creating pain in their lives. The other question I often get, especially now that we’ve made these cute little kids stories, people keep saying, “But what do you have for teens or for young adults?”

And they mean in Catholic Mom Calm. They mean, “I have teens and young adults. Can you help me?” Not resources yet for teens. We do get that question sometimes too. But I always wanna tell them Catholic Mom Calm is for everyone who is a mom, period.

It doesn’t matter how old you are. It doesn’t matter how old your kids are. It doesn’t matter how many kids you have or what you do with them. You have thoughts in your life that create pain in your body, and I can help you with that.

So I wanted to break down, in this episode, just several different topics of things that people wrote me about, totally anonymously. You won’t know who these people are. Just one, so you understand that we are all very similar.

We wanna be good moms. We want these kids to love the Lord. We want our houses to run somewhat smoothly. We don’t wanna be drowning in stuff. We don’t wanna be on our screens too much. I mean, there’s so many similarities that we all share, and our brains do such a good job of telling us that everything is wrong.

So the first topic I wanted to address was people with older children, teens or young adults, who don’t practice Catholicism, believe in God, wanna go to mass, anything in that bucket. Okay? And obviously, this is so painful for us to think about when we think, “I did something wrong. This is really bad. I’m worried about the salvation of my child.”

Okay? So those thoughts feel really real, and when you think those thoughts, you’re gonna feel terrible in your body. Everybody can just think them right now, and you feel terrible. You did something wrong, and we’re worried about this child’s salvation.

And here’s the thing. Let’s just address the first thought first. How can we even prove whether you did something wrong? How do you know that it isn’t part of God’s plan for this child to not be super into religion right now? I mean, you all know that that’s my story. That is exactly how I would’ve looked at 15 and 17 and 19 and 21, and then all of a sudden, somewhere around 23, 24, I gave my whole life to Christ and never looked back.

So I’m not saying we have to be happy and chipper about watching our children go through this, but you can choose to think instead, this is the path that they’re on. God is with them. They can not believe in God all they want, and God’s just walking right next to them like, “It’s fine. I’m here. I love you. You’re gonna come back to me.” He has a plan.

And I guarantee that the way that you show up in your life is going to feel yucky for you and for this child, however old they are, if you keep thinking these thoughts. So I know that everybody wants to buy a book on how to keep your kids Catholic. I’m sure there are some books like that. But I wanna teach my kids how to pay attention to their thinking, and to know that, and I just say it calmly, it does not sound threatening.

And I just say, “If I meet someone who doesn’t love the Lord and have a relationship with him, I know they have a hole inside of them, period. I know that there is a hole, and they’re gonna chase other things to fill that hole, and nothing will fill that hole.” And I want to believe that everyone will figure it out. There is no upside to believing that they’re not gonna figure it out

But I do know that you continuing to swirl on these negative thoughts is not going to show these kids the light of Christ, and you are living without peace today, and Christ doesn’t want that for you.

Okay. The second topic that came up a lot, and I’m smushing these together but they’re different flavors, was perfectionism and negative self-talk or a poor self-image. Okay? And you can see how all of those are related because when we think that there is a bar that we’re supposed to be hitting and we’re not hitting it, and then we trash talk ourselves, then we have a low self-image, right?

So you can just think about a triangle of perfectionism, negative self-talk, low self-image. So there were many flavors of that, and the women would write into me and say, “I struggle with this.” And I want you to know that the phrase, the sentence if you will, “I struggle with negative self-talk,” is just a thought.

I know you think you’re telling me how it is, but what does that even mean, I struggle with it? We can’t quantify it, and it probably makes you feel terrible to think about that. And so my response is just, “Okay, do you wanna fix that?” Kinda like what we were talking about last week. Do you want to work on your negative self-talk?

I will tell you the answer for most women, first of all, I think most of them would be kind of dumbstruck and just be like, “Oh. I mean, yeah.” I’m like, “Okay, what are you doing to fix it?” And they’re not doing anything to fix it. So they’re just thinking this thought in their brain, “I struggle with negative self-talk,” and they are being negative in their minds, and they’re not even trying to work on it.

It would be like if you moved into a house and the color of the walls were a color that you really didn’t like, and every time you walked into a room you were like. Let’s just say they were a really garish yellow, and you were like, “Oh my gosh, I can’t stand these yellow walls. They’re so terrible,” and you wanted to tell everyone, ” I’m just really struggling with the color of the walls in our house.”

And you just kept talking about it and you were just in the house feeling terrible, looking at these walls like. And it was a beautiful house. That’s how it is about our negative soundtracks in our minds, and I just wanna tell that person, “Yeah, go get some paint and paint over them. Go do that.”

And we can do the same thing with our negative sentences that are in our mind. You can stop watering them, and you can choose to think different thoughts on purpose, and it’s everything. It is the difference between you having a good day today and you not having a good day today.

Now, there will always be negative emotions and negative things in our lives, so we’re not gonna walk around, again, with happiness all the time, but I actually think what we really want is acceptance and peace.

Like, I accept that this is the day that I’m having. I accept that this is the season that I’m in, and here’s what I can control, and I’m gonna control that. Which is thinking as positively as you can about that.

Let’s say we don’t have money to paint the walls in the house, and we just go, “You know what? I’m just gonna choose to be okay with the yellow walls. I’m not going to complain about it one more time. When we have money for paint, I’ll paint it.

And then when you feel your brain have the urge to complain about the yellow walls, you just go, “Oh, we’re not doing that anymore. We love this house. We’re so grateful. I am loving this month.”

Okay, and the next category that a lot of people emailed about was some version of clean house, organized house, too much stuff, clutter, things like that. And it’s the same thing. What you guys choose to think about your stuff will determine your experience of your stuff. I can be in a very messy room and feel cool as a cucumber, totally fine.

And then there are times when I’m in a messy room and I have lots of negative thoughts about it, and then I feel real tension in my body. But I know that my thoughts about the room are choices. They’re a choice. I have six kids and a business. I cannot choose to care about all the things in my house.

And so I just rank which ones are very important to me, which ones are middlingly important to me, and which ones are not important to me. The important ones I get done. The middling ones we do sometimes and sometimes we don’t.

And then there are a lot of things. I’m looking in my office right now. There are some, like something rubbed up against my wall in two different places and kind of rubbed off the paint, so the white is coming through, and I don’t love it. I wish that that was fixed, but it’s pretty low on my priority list. I bet it’s gonna look like that for another year.

Maybe over the winter I’ll be like, “Let’s get some paint and touch up the walls.” And that’s okay. I don’t look at it and let it bother me. But you guys are having thoughts that bother you, and you’re just allowing those thoughts to stay there instead of solving it.

And the two options you have are clean up the thing or tell yourself the truth, which is it’s not important enough to clean up the thing. There’s no cleaning police. I know some of you may have, like, moms who come over and chirp about your house. That is true for a very, very small number of you.

But the vast majority of you, you’re just having negative thoughts about your house, and if you stop beating yourself up and leaking out so much energy on how you think it should be different, then I want you just to go, “What do I wanna solve, and what do I want to let go for right now?” And it doesn’t mean anything about you in the future.

I mean, you know that all of us end up being, like, 55, 60 with clean houses and no kids there And that’s gonna happen for almost all of us. So it really is just this time, and I prefer to think we have a very lived-in house. We’re here all the time. I like signs of life.

And you may be particular about some things, and it might be possible for you to be particular about them and to get them done, and then you can just really like that about you. Let’s just say, maybe you really like the mudroom or the entryway of your house being really organized, and it just feels delicious to you to take out all the shoes, to sweep the cubbies, to hang up the jackets, and to put everything back. That sounds wonderful to me if that’s your experience of it.

But if you’re cleaning it thinking, “Oh, I hate this. I don’t even have time. I’m so bad at this. I can’t believe we let it get this bad. Why is it like this? Why is nobody else helping me?” And that’s how you’re talking to yourself while cleaning it, you’re gonna have such a negative experience not only of cleaning it.

But then later when it gets messy again, when you think about cleaning it, you’ll have a negative feeling in your body because you’ll remember how awful it was because of the way you spoke to yourself while you did it.

I think a lot of us have this thought, “I’m not good at sticking with things or continuing to do something.” And I might do an entire episode on this concept, but I just don’t have the expectation that I learn something and then I just do it forever. Just like we don’t have the expectation that we are gonna go to the gym and work out once and then be fit and strong.

I think the brain and our thoughts is much more like our physical fitness. And we just go in and out of doing a good job of taking care of our physical fitness, and then we just know that any time we want to, we can just come right back to it. And I think it’s the same thing with managing our minds. I do that. I’m really great at it sometimes.

I’m in a really good space right now. I’ve been really paying attention to my brain and thinking about what I want to think about on purpose, and I’m having a good summer. I’m having a good time. I’m having such a good time that one of my kids said that one of my older kids, very intellectually, made an argument about why she thought I was spoiled, which was wild to me. She was very far off, so it did not hurt my feelings.

And then another one of my child patted my stomach and said, “Is there a baby in there?” And I said, “No.” And then he said, “Why is it so big?” So those two things happened to me. They might have even been on the same day. No, they were back-to-back days. And I am just so happy right now in my life that neither one of those made me freak out.

I just took a deep breath and was like, “Yeah, that’s fine. Kids say stuff.” The first one was harder because my brain had thoughts like, “Oh, I’m sad that my daughter thinks this,” and it was wrong what she thought. But I broke it down for her and I was very calm and I said, “Hey, let me explain this and this and this to you. Like, here’s why I’m not spoiled.”

And it was very silly. I feel like it was so personal and she felt so embarrassed later that I’m not sure I wanna share it to protect her. But. And then the same thing, like, I don’t mind being a little fluffy. I’m a little fluffy, and it’s okay that my son basically said, “You’re a little fluffy.” He didn’t use those words, you know, but it was fair of him to say, “Is there a baby in your tummy?”

But I just really like myself and I’m thinking, “I think I’m doing a good job. I think I’m being a good mom this summer. I like how I’m eating. I’ve been walking every day. I’m really loving my work right now.” And because I’m managing my mind, all those things don’t feel big.

So over and over again, I just, I got emails from people that just said, ” let me just tell you about my thing. It’s so big, it’s so hard.” And actually several people said, “Here are my five to seven things, and I feel so overwhelmed and I don’t know where to start.” But my answer for all of them is, with your brain, honey. With your brain.

That’s where we start, is you stop believing everything that you think. You just start noticing your thinking and redirecting your brain and thinking things that make you feel better. Real things. There are a lot of things I don’t like about the house that we’re in. I’ve shared that many times. We have this kind of like patched together, no building code, North Idaho home.

And for many reasons, we have not chosen to remodel it, so we’re just kind of living in this unfinished house. And when I choose to think about that, it makes me feel yucky. I could feel it. I can feel my brain wanting to do that right now. It wants to, like, do the litany, and then this, and then this other thing, and then that, and why.

And I just. it wants to swirl about that, and then it makes me feel so unhappy. When I could just as easily think about the things I love about this house, and there are so many things. So when I say think things that make you feel better, it’s not fake things. We’re not living in a fantasy land. I’m not like, “I live in a wonderful, immaculate home that’s perfectly put together and has wonderful trim.”

I mean, we have, like, no drywall in many sections downstairs, like just exposed whatever’s behind the drywall and concrete floors. I’m not asking you to think something that isn’t true. I want you to focus on the things that are true that do make you feel better, and there are wonderful things about this house.

And sometimes one of my favorite thoughts is I’m so glad we don’t have a nice house because these feral boys destroy everything, and I think I would really like a nice house in maybe five years when they’ve stopped. I don’t even know if they’ll stop by then. You guys let me know. You let me know when boys stop destroying everything.

So I was really grateful for everybody who wrote in. I mean, it was so many emails. It was just, it was so wonderful, and I am very thankful for you sharing what’s hard, and I’m not minimizing any of it. I mean, people wrote in about, unexpected child loss or infertility or really painful marriage things or really painful money things, like some really big things.

But even that, even the way I just said that, “Oh, those are big things,” that is just a thought. Can you see that? Because as a coach, like if you paid me money to make your life better and I was wearing my coach hat and not your friend hat, I would say, “Yes, I can see that you’re thinking really painful thoughts about that right now.”

And that is what’s creating pain in your body and I can help you with that. I’m not minimizing what you’re going through, but I can help it feel less painful by training your brain to think about it differently.

And I guarantee you can do that. We’ve been thinking about doing Mary’s Heart, Martha’s Order again in the fall because we love it. We love that program. It’s so fun. It’s a darling, and it’s just a great September kind of like get back to meal planning, get back to systems, pray and plan.

But as I’ve been thinking about that, we still may, and please if you want us to find some way to contact me or my team and just be like, “Yes, we would want that,” I’d love to know your feedback about that.

But I’ve been thinking about just teaching this one thing. Like, listen, the way you think about the things that are hard in your life is determining how you experience your day. It’s just really one thing.

And it feels too simple, but I want to grab your face in my hands very gently and just say, “Please, please do it, though. Please do it.” You know, taking a walk is simple, and it’s so good for us, and there’s so much data on why walking is so great, and yet we don’t do it. And this takes less time than walking.

But we just keep kind of thinking about and talking about the things that are painful in our lives without recognizing that we have the agency to think about them differently, and it makes all the difference.

Now, I have 50 more tools I could teach you. You know? There’s nuance and there’s calming your body down, and there’s praying and talking to the Lord, and there’s really great parenting phrases. Like, there’s so many practical things that can help you.

But I just find that if I can get someone to do this and manage their mind, they naturally will go find the practical things that help make their lives better. But it really starts with the way that we think about everything.

And so this is how we solve any problem is first we think about it in a way that makes us feel better. And then we go try practical things to solve it. But so much of the pain that we are all experiencing is just because of how we’re thinking about what’s happening in our lives.

And listen, I just think it’s the most Catholic thing, because Jesus tells us and the saints tell us all the time that we should be at peace. We should never be anxious. How is that even possible? It’s possible because they know that those feelings come from our thinking, and we get to control our thinking.

So you can be in Auschwitz singing hymns and be at peace with that situation. You can watch your son be crucified and be at peace with that situation because you know that it is God’s will right then.

So I want you to think about what’s painful in your life and just play with it a little bit. Be a little playful, and just think, “What’s the best feeling I could reach for about this? What’s the most positive version of thinking of this that would create a positive emotion in my body, or even just a neutral one?” ‘Cause neutral is better than overwhelm, confusion, guilt, panic.

You know, a lot of the emotions that we are feeling, but this is the control that we have. And I don’t want just you to learn it, I want you to learn it right now so you can teach your kids. We have just got to create another generation, like a new generation, who knows how to pay attention to their thinking and then chooses quiet on purpose to cultivate more inner peace

Okay. I love you. Calm Catholic Kids collection four and five is coming out very soon. The Kindness collection is out, and it is free. I’m still teaching in Catholic Finishing School this summer. It has been a good time. You can join anytime if your daughter is a teenager. And we still have some spots for France, so come check that out.

And then in the Catholic Mom Calm community, we are coaching really on everything, but we’re calling it Good Mom Summer, and it’s been fascinating. Thank you for bringing your brains to me and all the ways that we think that we’re not good moms, and I’m watching it just clean up. It’s so fun to watch you guys start to feel like the good mom that you are.

You were already a good mom, but I’m watching these moms find evidence in their brains that they’re doing a good job, and it just makes the day so much better when you think you’re not doing a bad job. Go figure.

All right, you guys, thank you so much for listening. I’m praying for you. Please pray for me and have a blessed day.