Episode 183
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You are listening to episode 183 of the Peaceful Mind Podcast.
Welcome to The Peaceful Mind Podcast, a place for creating the peace of mind. You need to be the best mom. You are created by God to be if you wanna bring more balance, more joy, and more peace to your motherhood. This is the place for you. I'm your host, certified life coach at Catholic Mom Danielle Thienel..
In the name of the father of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Let's get started.
Welcome back, dear listeners, to another episode of the Peaceful Mind Podcast for Busy Moms. I'm your host, Danielle, and today we are diving in to a topic that I coach on very frequently in my life coaching program, and it's also one that we receive a lot of questions about, and that is essentially, How do I change my husband?
Now? I named this episode Husband Help because it is, it's kind of some form of that, please help me with my husband, or My husband is doing this, or I want this to change about my husband and. Essentially the underlining when they're like, help me with this issue or challenge I'm having with my spouse is what the brain or what the person is really telling me what their brain wants the answer to be is, please give me the answer of how to change him because if I can change him, If I can have him stop saying what he's saying or doing what he's doing, or start, you know, acting differently and here's the list of what I think he should be doing or what I want him to be doing, really, essentially what you're asking me is to help change him.
And I wanna approach this topic today to be able to help you and it will have us. Taking a look, the, the most simple and direct way that I know to be able to give you some awareness. First of all, why your brain is asking this and makes complete sense, and second of all, giving you the tool that is what will help you to go forward to see that this.
Is an impossible task. Now we've got husband in here and that's where I do want you to take your mind with, but just know that we could insert anybody in here. We could insert, how do I change my kids? How do I change my mom? How do I change my in-laws? How do I change my boss? That is essentially what our brain is wanting to do because what it thinks is that if we do, if they would just.
Act different and do the things that I think that they should do, then I would feel better. And I'm gonna draw on the principles of the model. This is, I, I've spoken about it many times over the podcast, the model, and it's five different categories. And this model comes from the certification I've received at the Life Coach School, school.
And it's a. A, a beautiful, powerful tool to help us get awareness about what we're really creating in our lives. And I'm a big believer in this tool, and I think it's the number one thing to help you see that when we are looking at our husbands, where they fit, what they say and what they do, and. Who they are, like as they exist as your spouse, they fit into the category of a circumstance to you.
So if I just review the model real quick, the five categories, there's circumstances, then we have thoughts about those circumstances, those thoughts then create feelings in our body. How we feel then drives every action we take in the world, and it's all of our actions and inactions that create the results that we have.
So when we wanna create a different result in regards to our husband, know that we can't do that because he is. Fits in the circumstance line. So all our power lies in quote, changing our husband is to focus on the middle part of the model, our thoughts, our feelings, and our actions. And if, and notice I say our, so the control that we're looking for when it feels out of control, when our husbands don't show up the way we want to, comes from when we.
Pivot and adjust our thoughts, feelings, and our own actions. The model suggests that we can't change anyone else, but we certainly can change our own thoughts and reactions to what our husbands do and say. So in essence, we are going to be discussing how to change your perspective of your husband. So, That is the best help when I've titled this episode Husband Help.
The best help I can give you. Now, let me repeat that. The best help I can give you is to teach you how to change your perspective of your husband instead of how do I change my husband? Because changing your perspective of your husband is in fact the only thing you truly have control over. So let's start with the premise that we've often discussed here, that every person is on their own journey.
They have their own agency. You have your own thoughts inside your brain that no one else can take away from you, and that includes your husband. We can't control his journey, just like. He can't control ours. And while it's perfectly okay to express to them how we feel and to communicate with our husbands and request changes, ultimately what they decide to do with those requests is totally up to them.
So if we say, Honey, husband, I would like you to take out the garbage regularly and on this day and at this time. Yeah. If that is something that you want and wish and hope and him to do, certainly you have the ownership to communicate them. Where I want you to release the control is ultimately knowing that if he decides to do it or not, Is totally up to him.
So how do we apply the model to. The different situations we find ourselves when we want our husbands to change. And again, as I mentioned, we remember that we're always in this world, in this earthly experience working with five main components. Everything that's going on in our life where we feel overwhelmed by or confused by, we can always get simplicity by asking ourselves, okay, what is really going on here?
What is happening? And the way that we can. Get a great awareness around it is to take what's going on and divide it up and, and find out which category of the model, the self-coaching model tool does it fit in circumstance, thought, feeling, action, or result. So the circumstances are the facts, and in this case, the facts are going to be your husband's actions or behaviors, including what he says to you.
And your thoughts about these actions or behaviors, they lead to your feelings, which then trigger your actions and eventually yield your results. So I'm gonna give you a very recent example from one of my clients who brought this up to me this week. She was feeling alone and abandoned. That was the feeling.
She was attributing it to some words that her husband told her the night before, but it was also not serving her and keeping her in this place of pain when she was believing that it was his words that caused her feeling abandoned, when in fact it was her thoughts about what he said. Which were something along the line of, I can't believe you're saying that to me, that's so disrespectful and rude.
You don't help with anything. You leave me to take care of everything by myself. You're taking your anger out on me and those thoughts. Collectively created her feelings of alone and abandoned in her situation. In her situation. So let's say your husband often leaves his dirty socks on the floor and you find it bothersome.
The circumstance or fact is husband leaves socks on the floor, or just husband's socks on the floor. And your thought might be, he doesn't respect our shared space. This thought leads to feelings of annoyance or frustration, and then it causes you to then react angrily or resentfully, which then only escalates the tension.
And really it just has you in a state that you don't wanna be in, and it doesn't really solve the problem. So here's where the power of the model comes in. We can't change the circumstance. Those socks are on the floor, and that was your husband's behavior. That's what he chose to do. But we can change our thoughts and reactions to the circumstance.
So instead of thinking he doesn't respect our shared space, which leads to negative emotions, what if we tried a different thought, something like, he's been distracted or he didn't remember this time. He's has a lot on his plate right now, or it'll only take me a second to pick him up and put him in the hamper and I'm fine with that.
Maybe it's, I wanna talk to him about this later, but this change in thought is what can lead to more understanding compassionate feelings. Empathy perhaps. But ultimately what I wanna point out to you is that it's prompting a calmer action from you, like maybe a gentle reminder to him rather than an angry reaction.
So the crux of the matter is that we can't force anyone to change. And I often have my listeners, my clients, my moms, my. The women that I coach, really, really wishing that it was more easy and simple to just that they should change, but attempting so often leads to their frustration and unhappiness. But what.
The model helps us do is get awareness that, first of all, I get it, that we will have these negative thoughts about it all to begin with. That's not a problem, and we don't wanna just sugarcoat it with positive thoughts. But we do want to realize that what the result that we're after will require a change on our part instead of keeping ourselves spinning and stuck in the loop and, and feeling the negative emotions because we are putting all of our focus in.
If only he would change. That is what I want you the to take away from the husband help. This is how the best I can help you. Is to alter your emotional response to things, how you approach the situations, your perspective on the circumstances of how our husbands act and say, and do, and what they don't do and how they show up because it's your emotional response that is driven from your thinking.
That will give you the end result of whether you like it or don't like. So it is the shifting of a perspective and expressing your feelings in a calm and non accusatory manner will help create a positive environment for change way more peacefully. And I do think easily and probably more quickly to get you to the change that you want.
I, I always hone in that the quicker route to getting other people to change is really when you take the focus on them, off of them and their behaviors and put it on yourself. And yes, sometimes it means having to say, all right, okay. I know I can't change them, so what do I want to do about it? To bring about more peace to my life?
And now I'm gonna pivot a little bit to talk about maybe some of the most, you know, common areas that we want to focus on. There's probably not everything in your relationship that you, that is frustrating to you or that you wanna change about your spouse. And so I'm just gonna offer you know, a list and just a quick Ideas for you to think about and ponder, right?
Because my whole point for these episodes is to get you to think about things because where your focus is is where. That's what grows. And so if there are some areas where you want help in your relationship with your husband, especially if you're thinking that you want him to change in these areas, maybe this will just, you know, spark some ideas of where you can put your focus.
The first one I really wanna bring up is again, what I said in the whole first half of this episode was you want to understand your, your. Get a, a shift of perspective on your husband, and one of the way I do that with my client, one of the ways I do that with my clients is to, for a moment, have you step into your husband's perspective on life, which kind of gives you some compassion.
About why he is showing up the way he is. And so for you to first seek out coaching yourself on the subject, again, that is because we wanna be able to make the changes you do have control over, which is over you. But when I do help my clients with that, I often have them going into their quote husband's models, but in a way to say, oh, Yeah, I can see he's been super stressed at work this week.
I knew they had like a, a big client in town and he had, I don't know, this report to make and it was, you know, he was stressed. So then he forgot to do the things that I asked him to do. You know, just kind of again, is that something that you want to be able to do is to first pause instead of getting frustrated at what he's doing, but.
Instead step into understanding your husband's perspective more. That might be just one takeaway that you take that you wanna go into action with today. The other one is effective communication. If you are thinking, 'cause this one was, mine was my husband. He's just, he's not, he's quiet. He's not a communicator.
Unlike me who, Obviously, I guess it's a good thing. You can see I have a podcast. I like to talk. That's my avenue of communication. So is that the area that you're frustrated with with wanting to change your husband? And if so, what You can learn here on this podcast about your feelings. Maybe how you communicate them and what, what drives your, creates your feelings and what drives your actions, whether you express them or not.
That's where you might want to. Up your focus, right? Maybe the focus is I'm gonna figure out how to be able to communicate better myself in a non-confrontational way, or be more open and more honest. And again, when you do that work on yourself, you're, you're going to have your eyes open and you'll have more compassion that your husband just doesn't perhaps know those ways, but, Instead of telling him, I wanna urge you to change yourself and then you can show him.
What about getting to know more about the language of love? I don't know if you're familiar with the book, the Five Love Languages, but I, I think it's by the author Gary Chapman. But I remember realizing that and could really understand what my quote love language was, and. It just gave me, again, a different perspective of why there's things that I place more importance on, and then figuring out what his love language was.
I, I remember that being super helpful. Super helpful to me. And so maybe that's something you want to do. How about knowing your impact of stress, and if you are someone who is stressed and overwhelmed right now, then what are you going to do to make progress on lowering that stress and overwhelm? Of course, I can't help but say that that is exactly what I help moms with.
So I believe that all the life coaching tools and strategies are perfect for that. But other than the mental. Work that we do here in coaching. What else can you take, get into action and do today to lower your stress? That can impact your behavior of how you show up when your husband, you know, when he acts as or behaves a certain way.
So stress management techniques are amazing. And again, we don't have to offer them to our husband. If you think he's stressed, we wanna first make sure we are walking the talk. Instead of telling him what you think he should do, a lot of times being an example of what's possible for him is all you need for for him to start to take on the changes that you're wishing that you had.
We, of course, wanna nurture our intimacy and make sure that we are. You know, choosing thoughts that bring us connected. Are you focusing on what it is that you love about him and what you're grateful for about him? Because this is definitely going to affect the level of your connection. Have you been focusing on all the things that he's not doing?
And what you don't like and is frustrating and how he hasn't changed and how it'll never change and all of that. Well, that of course isn't gonna nurture your intimacy and definitely help, you know, be a factor in having more disconnection. Qual, are you having some quality time together? This quality time.
I know that a lot of moms saying, I don't have time. And maybe you're in the stage of motherhood where you have lots of littles and you're going ever, which way? But maybe serve this episode as a reminder that no matter what stage of motherhood you're in or how many kids you have or what it's going on it, you can if you focus on it and decide that that's a goal of yours to make, having quality time together in some form or fashion, even if it's after the kids are asleep.
We want to make sure that you have that as one of your relationship goals and you can fit it in no matter what stage you're in. I just want to serve that as a reminder to you. We wanna manage our expectations with each other. You guys, we are all human. Your husband is a human. He has a human brain just like you.
He will make mistakes just like you. He will judge just like you. He will mess up. He will get frustrated, right? And so let's manage our expectations. And I love to add this thought anytime. My husband might do something at first where I'm like, oh geez, here, go again or something. I just say, oh, there he goes, being human again.
So we're, we're wanting to give. Ourself grace. And we are also wanting to give our spouses grace too. Well that is what I wanted to offer you all today in the form of husband help. And of course there, you know, we can't do everything on one podcast episode and it is a subject that is really, really important to.
To understand with, if you wanna go down the path of having more peace and joy and balance in your life. Definitely. As our relationship with our spouses. And so it is a subject that we coach on a lot in the program and it is so helpful for you to also learn from other moms who are going through. And wives going through the same thing and grabbing these coaching tools to help you enrich your relationship and just really have a perspective shift in your mind that will have you having a stronger and more enjoyable marriage.
And so if you want to dive deeper into this subject and want more and want my own help, please come to a call and I'm happy to give you that help. All right, so. Let's remember that we are after a change in perspective of our husband instead of after waiting for him to change. We want to take control of our thoughts, feelings, and actions to change ourselves.
And then I promise you that is the pathway to seeing the change from others. Alright, everybody, I just wanna say thank you for being a listener of the podcast. I appreciate you so much. If you get really help from this, I would love a rate. Rating and review, and I cannot wait to be back here again with you next week.
I've got some really exciting podcasts up for you soon, so have a great week. Take care. Thank you for tuning in to today's episode of The Peaceful Mind Podcast. Are you ready to take everything I teach you here and put it to work for your own life? To really learn how to have peace of mind no matter what is happening around you.
If so, I'd love to have you as a client, as your coach. This is where you'll get personal and focus time on your own mind, using life coaching tools, concepts, and proven life, transforming wisdom, all through a faith-filled lens. To learn more about how we can work together, come on over to daniellethienel.com
there you'll see how to sign up for a free coaching consult and learn how to get started. Until next time, peace be with you always.
