The Magic of Love and Gratitude: Showing Up Intentionally This Thanksgiving

Leanna Laskey McGrath  0:08  

Welcome to the executive coach for moms podcast where we support women who are attempting to find balance and joy while simultaneously leading people at work and at home. I'm your host, Leanna Laskey McGrath, former tech exec turned full time mom, recovering perfectionist and workaholic and certified executive coach. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  0:32  

Hi everyone. Happy Thanksgiving. I want to make this one short and sweet, because I know today might be very scheduled out for you, whether you're doing the rounds to all the family and step family dinners, or you're hosting everyone at your house like I am. I know that holidays are kind of two sides of the same coin, with lovely family-centered memories, full of love and joy on one side, and stress-inducing high pressure, high emotions on the other. So I just want to share a couple of things that I think might help to make the day a little bit less stressful and a little bit more joyful for you. And you can really use this on any day or at any time during the holiday season. But since Thanksgiving happens to fall on a Thursday, and I publish new episodes every Thursday, I felt like it made sense to do something special for it. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  1:27  

So before you get into it, before you join your family, maybe you're listening to this on your morning walk, or as you're making mashed potatoes, I would love to invite you just to spend a couple minutes reflecting and connecting to yourself, I find that taking a few minutes for myself before the hustle and bustle begins always allows me to be more intentional throughout the day, and when I start to lose that intentionality, as I do because I'm a human, I may need to take a few seconds or minutes to myself to kind of drown out the noise. Tune back in and recenter myself. So if you find yourself needing that at any point today, please allow yourself a couple of minutes or more to take yourself out of the situation. Take some breaths and recenter yourself so that you can show up the way you want to. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and it's actually amazing to take care of yourself. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  2:23  

So as we all know, today is all about gratitude and giving thanks. So I want to talk about the magic of it, the magic of gratitude. I think that gratitude has the opportunity to be such a gift whenever we are focusing on it. I think it can also make us feel kind of gaslit and invalidated when people are telling us to constantly be grateful as a way to ignore when things are hard, and I think that like takes it all the way to the extreme, and it's definitely not the kind of gratitude that I want to talk about today. But the reality is, is that at some point during this lovely memory filled holiday that often feels like it's all on our shoulders as moms to make amazing you're probably gonna feel annoyed, frustrated or irritated with someone that you love. That might be your partner, your kids, your mom, your uncle, your in laws, whoever you're interacting with today or on any day. And you know from listening to this podcast that our thoughts create our feelings. So if you're suddenly feeling rage towards your husband or partner because they were supposed to take the turkey out of the fridge as soon as they woke up and they didn't, and now it's thrown off the whole time. Or if your kids are fighting over the last roll after they've already had five of them, or if they're refusing to eat the lovely meal that you've prepared, or if your mother in law is making that comment that she always makes, just know that like, these things will probably happen today, some version of them. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  4:04  

And I think a lot of times when we imagine holidays, we imagine that those days are different from all the other days. We imagine this, like perfect scenario where everybody acts exactly the way we want them to, and where we show up as this immaculate, perfect version of ourselves, and I think we build it up in our mind, and it raises our expectations so exponentially high, beyond the realm of like, what's actually possible and realistic. And it's kind of like we're setting ourselves up for failure. And it's it's okay, we all do this, I just think that it's a lot more enjoyable than imagining the worst case scenarios, although I'm sure our brains are also doing that, planning for that in the background, too. But we build up these days, and we put so much pressure on ourselves and on all the other characters in our story to play their parts, and when it doesn't go as planned, we often will get angry, frustrated, feel resentful, and decide that nobody is grateful for all of our hard work, and we just often don't enjoy the day as much as we can. So if this has ever happened to you, you are not alone. This has happened to me on holidays as well. It's happened to many of the people that I work with, many friends that I've talked to. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  5:22  

So here's what I want to suggest right now, before everything gets crazy for the day, decide right now how you want to be today. How do you want to show up? Decide how you're going to respond when someone says something frustrating. What thoughts do you want to think whenever this happens? What actions will you take? And most importantly, what is the essence of how you'll show up? If you want to describe it in a word or two, one of my words is often calm or equan- I never know how to pronounce this equan- equanimity is the aura that I try to bring to myself. That's kind of how I want to show up. So decide ahead of time, and here's what I believe helps. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  6:04  

Let's imagine that we have multiple sets of glasses. We have a drawer full of sunglasses. And actually what prompted this visual for me was last night, my daughter actually pulled all of our sunglasses out of our sunglasses drawer and played sunglasses shop with us as we were getting the house ready for Thanksgiving. So we pretended that looking through each pair of sunglasses had different views. And so I want you to imagine that you have multiple sets of glasses or sunglasses, and each one shows you a different view. So maybe one set is your annoyed glasses. And so everything that you look at annoys the crap out of you. Maybe one set is joyful, and everything that you look at causes you to suddenly feel full of joy. One set is scarcity, and everything you look at reminds you that you're not enough, you don't have enough, you don't give enough. You should have tried harder. You should have done better. All of these lenses are available to us, and I think often when we're feeling frustrated or annoyed about things, it's just because we're wearing our frustrated lenses. Anias Nin has a wonderful quote that goes, "we do not see the world as it is. We see it as we are."So who will you be today? Which pair of glasses do you want to put on today? 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  7:23  

And might I suggest, if you're contemplating the lenses of love and gratitude, when we are wearing these lenses, we can look at the annoying things that people are doing, and we can kind of pay less attention to the behavior or the words and more attention to the person behind them. When we're looking through those lenses of love and gratitude, we can see that person that we deeply love, and when we focus on that, we can feel a greater sense of connection and a lower sense of annoyance or irritation or rage with them. When we are wearing the lenses of gratitude and we look at the dinner table with the kids running around and fighting and chaos everywhere that often drives up our anxiety, we can focus less on all the chaos and more on the gratitude for the most important people in our lives, all being in one room together for this beautiful meal that we're about to have together. We can also look at all of those things that we have with love and gratitude, a warm home, electricity, clean water, a nice meal, people who love us. There are so many opportunities to look around through those lenses and find things that make us feel warm and loving and loved and good, and give us those really good feelings that we want to feel. So decide now which lenses you're going to wear today, how you're going to look at things and people throughout the day. It's totally up to you, and I think that's the most important thing to recognize, is that you get to choose. Nobody else gets to rip off your lenses and put on different ones for you. You choose how you are looking at things that is 100% within your control. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  9:10  

And one caveat I just want to throw out there, if you are looking at your loved ones and the things you have through this lens for the first time or the first time in a while, I think we sometimes have a tendency to then want to beat ourselves up about, oh, why don't I do this all the time? And why don't I do this more often? And, you know, we kind of make it mean something about ourselves, and we get into a shame spiral about just how we're not doing it right, and we make it mean bad things about ourselves. I just want to invite you to focus on the fact that you're doing it today and you won't do it perfectly today, because you're a human and nobody else is gonna do it perfectly today either. But please try to stay focused on that and the way that you're looking at things today, and not dive into a shame spiral, because Lord knows, ain't none of us got time for that today, especially on a holiday. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  9:59  

The other thing that's important about these lenses is how wide or narrow they are in scope. I think our loved ones can drive us crazy sometimes, right? We can all relate to that, but when we step back and think about it, you know you love them so much, right? And you're so grateful to have them in your life. And I think that's the key right there, that exercise of stepping back and thinking about it, zooming the lens out. It's really hard to do when you're going through the motions, getting through the to do list, and there's so much to do, and you're just looking at that next task in front of you and thinking about all the things you need to do. When we do that, we have a very narrow scope, but when we can zoom the lens out, step back, when we can ask ourselves questions, like, when I'm at the end of my life looking back, what do I want to remember about this day when I step back and look at my family? What do I love about them? What do I appreciate about this person? And I would invite you to take a little bit of time, just one or two minutes as soon as you're done with this episode to zoom out and look at your family through the lens of love and gratitude and through that wide lens and ask yourself, What do I love and appreciate about each person? And I know it's gonna feel like you don't have time, but I highly encourage you to write down five things about each person, starting with the one you find it most difficult to find things about and then refer back as needed. I promise it will help you to show up more in the way you want to show up today, and it will cause you to waste less energy later, and therefore time, if you take a little bit of time up front. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  11:37  

Another benefit of zooming out the lens is that it helps us get more clear on what's important and what's less important, because those less important things tend to fade away when we're looking through that wide lens. So often, as perfectionists and high achievers, we want to make sure that everything is perfect, every little component. But I think zooming the lens out allows us to ask ourselves, what do I want my kids to remember about this day. I promise, and I think, as you know, they are way less likely to remember the perfect sweet potato casserole that you made, and they're way more likely to remember their mom being present and enjoying them on Thanksgiving and laughing and having a good time. They're not going to remember the perfect place setting, but they will remember you delighting in their presence. So today, and honestly, every day, really, I invite you to be intentional about which glasses you select, which lenses you're putting on, and what you're choosing to focus on. Ask yourself, how do I want to show up today? What do I want to remember about today? What do I want my kids to remember about today? And what do I appreciate about each of my loved ones. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  12:42  

I am so incredibly grateful to you, listener for supporting this podcast and for hopefully letting it help you show up in the way you want to, so that you can live a life that you love. That is my wish for everyone, that we create the lives we want to live, and we can do that by intentionally deciding each day how we want to show up so we can live our best lives. Happy Thanksgiving everyone. And thank you so much for tuning in. 

Leanna Laskey McGrath  13:09  

Thanks so much for tuning in to the executive coach for moms podcast. Please like, subscribe or follow the show so you'll be notified when the next episode is available. I hope you'll join me again next time. Take care.