The Mission Driven Mom Podcast

Audrey Rindlisbacher
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  • Self-Improvement
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For moms and women who want to increase their confidence, and discover and develop their unique gifts, while strengthening themselves and their families. *Over 50 5-Star Reviews*

  1. 2d ago

    EP 178 Mental Map is Wrong

    Imagine you’re driving through a city you’ve never visited before. You’re following every turn on the map exactly, and you’re completely lost. So you drive more carefully, pay closer attention, and get even more lost. At what point does it occur to you that maybe the problem isn’t you? Maybe the map is wrong. Resources from the Episode: The Mission Driven Life: The 7 Laws of Life Mission and How to Live Them The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth by M. Scott Peck The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey Episode 176: Everything Right and Wrong Episode 175: Trusting Myself  AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 178: Mental Map Is Wrong Maybe the Map Is Wrong Audrey: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. I want you to imagine you're driving through a city that you've never visited before. You've got the map open in front of you. You're watching every street sign. You're following every turn exactly, and you're completely lost. So you look at the map again. You drive more carefully. You pay closer attention. You retrace your steps and you try again. You get even more lost. At what point does it occur to you that maybe the problem isn't you? Maybe the map is wrong. I think we do this in our lives all the time. We try harder. We read another book. We become more disciplined. We promise ourselves we'll respond differently the next time. But sometimes the problem isn't how well you're following the map. The problem is that something on the map isn't true. And here's the really unsettling part. Most of us don't know that we're looking at a map. We think we're looking at reality. That's what I want to talk to you about today. Our Road Trip Maps Audrey: Back in the '90s, my husband and I went on a long road trip. This was before we had GPS telling us exactly where to turn. So we started our trip with a big map of several states that we'd be driving through. And along the way, we wanted to sightsee in different cities. But our big state map didn't have all the little streets and lights and turns that we needed. So whenever we arrived in a new city, we'd stop at a gas station, we'd fill up the car, and we'd buy a local map. I have all these memories of sitting in the passenger seat with this giant paper map spread across the dashboard, trying to give my husband directions through a city that we'd never visited before. And even though these maps were pretty accurate, we would inevitably make wrong turns. I'd miss something. We'd miss an exit. We'd have to turn around. Sometimes it was really frustrating, and sometimes we just tried to laugh about it. But our ability to get from where we were to where we wanted to be depended on two things: the accuracy of our map, and the accuracy of my ability to follow it. We Are the Map Makers Audrey: Our lives work very much the same way, except in our lives, we're also the map makers. M. Scott Peck wrote: "We are not born with maps; we have to make them, and the making requires effort." Stephen Covey taught: "Each of us has many, many maps in our head. We interpret everything we experience through these mental maps." From the time we're very young, we're constructing a map of reality and our place within it. We're learning: What are people like? Can I trust them? What happens when I make a mistake? What does it mean when someone is angry with me? What makes me lovable? What does a good mother do? What does a good marriage look like? What does failure mean? What am I responsible for? Who is God? What does God expect from me? Who am I? What am I capable of? We don't actually sit down and deliberately decide any of those things or put them on a map, but we construct it from what we're taught and what we experience. Our parents contribute to it. Our teachers do, our religion, our culture, books, experts, friends, painful experiences and wonderful experiences. And eventually, we have a fairly elaborate map that tells us how the world works. The problem is something Covey pointed out: "We seldom question their accuracy. We simply assume that the way we see things is the way they really are or the way they should be." And that's the problem. We forget we're looking at a map. We think we're looking directly at reality. The Blind Men and the Elephant Audrey: There's an old story I've loved for years that illustrates this beautifully. Six men who had been blind from birth were taken to meet an elephant. And each one approached the animal and touched a different part. One felt the elephant's side and declared that an elephant was like a wall. Another felt the trunk and said that it was like a snake. Another touched the tusk and said that an elephant was like a spear. Another blind man felt its leg and compared it to a cow. Another one touched the ear and thought it was a fan. And the last blind man grabbed the elephant's tail and decided an elephant was nothing more than a piece of rope. Then they began arguing about what an elephant really is. And finally, the Rajah interrupted them and pointed out that each man had touched only one part of the elephant. They would have to put the parts together if they wanted to understand the whole. And here's what I find so interesting about this story. The blind men weren't simply wrong. Each one had encountered something real. The elephant's side really did have some qualities of a wall. The trunk was really somewhat like a snake. And the tusk was like a spear. Their mistake was taking their limited experience of reality and mistaking it for the whole of reality. Observation, Interpretation, Conclusion Audrey: And I think we do this constantly. Something happens, we experience one part of it, and we interpret it. We draw a conclusion. And then we write that conclusion onto the map. So for example, let's say my teenage daughter comes through the front door, doesn't say hello, walks upstairs, and shuts her bedroom door. So what happened? She came through the door, she didn't say hello, she went upstairs, she shut the door. But I might say, "She was so disrespectful." Well, maybe she was. But notice I've already moved from observation to interpretation. And I may keep going like this: She's mad at me. She doesn't want to be around the family. We're growing apart. She doesn't respect me. I've done something wrong. I'm losing my daughter. It spirals out of control. And by the time I walk upstairs to confront her, I may no longer be responding merely to what actually happened. I'm responding to what I've decided what happened meant. Now, maybe I'm right. Maybe she was really trying to be disrespectful. But the point isn't that our interpretations are always wrong. The answer certainly isn't to stop trusting your own judgment. We talked about that a few weeks ago. The problem is that we often fail to distinguish between what I observed, what I inferred from that, and then what I concluded. And then I treat all three as if they're actually true. I touched the trunk, therefore I know exactly what an elephant is like. And this matters because our maps don't just passively sit in our heads. We navigate by them. And what I believe affects how I interpret my experiences in life. It affects everything. My interpretation affects my judgment, and my judgment affects the choices, and the choices, the actions, and the actions have consequences. So you might think about it kind of like this. There's reality, which leads to the creation of a map, and then we interpret. We make judgments and choices. We take actions, and there are consequences. When Behavior Makes Perfect Sense Audrey: Which means something I think is incredibly important. A lot of behavior that looks irrational actually makes perfect sense when you understand the map that someone is holding. Why do I keep rescuing my adult child, even though I know I'm exhausted and it doesn't seem to be helping? Maybe somewhere on my map it says a good mother protects her children from suffering. If that's true, then rescuing makes perfect sense. Why do I have such a difficult time setting a boundary when someone continually takes advantage of me? Maybe my map says if someone I love is upset with me, I've done something wrong. And of course, if that's true, a boundary feels wrong. Why do I keep asking everyone what they think before I make a difficult decision? Maybe because my map says wise people know that they're making the right choice before they act. And if that's true, then uncertainty feels like evidence that I shouldn't trust myself. You see what's happening? We can spend years trying to change our behavior without ever examining the belief that makes the behavior seem reasonable or natural. Stop rescuing. Set the boundary. Trust yourself. Stop worrying. Speak up. Let go. But if the behavior makes perfect sense according to my map, I may find it inherently difficult to change. And now we're back to something that we've been talking about throughout the last few weeks. Sometimes trying harder isn't the answer. Sometimes we need to understand something better. The Map I Had to Revise Audrey: Remember the invisible contract I told you about a few weeks ago? For many years, some version of this was written on my mental map: If I do motherhood correctly, my children will turn out a certain way. And so I stayed home full time, and I worked on my own education so I could give them a good one. I even homeschooled. I took them to church. I tried to teach them everything I knew. I gave them experiences. I encouraged their talents and interests. And somewhere underneath all that effort was this belief about how motherhood worked: that if I paid a certain price, I would be guaranteed some kind of certain outcome. That they wouldn't suffer. That life wouldn't be all that hard for them.

  2. Oct 20

    EP 177 - Learnings Don't Change

    How many things do you know you should do that you still have a hard time living? Resources from the Episode:    The Mission Driven Life: The 7 Laws of Life Mission and How to Live Them    Free Masterclass: How to Stop Feeling Powerless and Become the Expert in Your Own Life    Mission Driven Mom Academy: A step-by-step journey through the 7 Laws of Life Mission    Episode 176: Everything Right and Wrong    Episode 174: Why Am I Struggling?   AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 177: Learnings Don't Change You Know What You Should Do Audrey: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. I want to ask you a question today: How many things do you know you should do that you actually still have a hard time living? For example, you know you shouldn't worry so much about what other people think, but you still do. You know you can't control your adult children, but their choices still consume your thoughts for days. You know you need to set a boundary, but when someone gets upset with you, you cave. You know you need to communicate honestly with your husband, but you avoid the conversation. You know you shouldn't compare yourself to other women, but you still find yourself doing it. You know you should forgive, but you keep replaying the offense. Or you know you have power over your own response. We talked about that last week. You can recognize what isn't yours to control. You can release it, turn your attention back to yourself, and say, "Okay, what's mine to govern here?" And sometimes you even know what you need to do. So why is it still so hard to do it? So Many Answers Audrey: That's a question I've thought about for years, because I've spent an enormous amount of time in my life learning. I've read hundreds of books. I've taken classes. I've been to therapy. I've listened to experts. I've studied relationships and parenting and personal development and education and faith. I've gone looking for answers to problems I was trying desperately to solve, and I learned a lot of good things. But for many years I had this frustrating experience of learning something that sounded completely true, getting excited about it, trying to apply it, and then discovering that my life didn't necessarily change very much. Or something worked for a little while, but it didn't work for another situation. Or I would read this really good book, and that author would tell me something completely different than what someone else did. One parenting expert would tell me to do one thing, and another would recommend almost the opposite. One relationship expert would tell me I needed to be more accommodating, and another would tell me that I needed stronger boundaries. One person would tell me to trust my feelings, and another would tell me my feelings weren't necessarily to be trusted. One person would tell me to sacrifice, another to engage in more self-care. One would tell me to push through the difficulty. Someone else would say that if something felt hard, maybe it wasn't right for me. And I was sincerely trying to learn. I was sincerely trying to change. But eventually I began to realize that there was a much deeper problem. I'd been given an enormous amount of answers, but I had never really been taught how to determine which answers were true. And that changed the entire way I thought about education. Learning to Ask, "Is This True?" Audrey: Because when I was a young mother, I was struggling in my marriage, with my parenting, financially, with my extended family, and especially with my own self-image. I had a lack of confidence and ability to lead myself and my family well. I just felt that something important was missing, and I couldn't figure out what it was. And I tried everything. I sought advice from others. I read books. I tried self-help courses. I went to women's retreats, to financial events. I listened to experts. I went to therapy. Nothing got much better, and I still felt unprepared to be a successful adult and thrive in the major areas of my life. I finally decided I should try to do something for my own development. I searched for a year and considered all sorts of things, from writing, mentoring, going back to college, selling Usborne books, starting a business. When I was finally introduced to classical liberal education, I had exactly zero reference point for what that was about. I'd literally never heard of it. When I finally saw the book list for the school that offered these online classes, I was blown away. They read the writings of people I'd only heard of. Some of them I'd never heard of. It was intriguing. As I mentioned before, it took a long time for me to give myself permission to take classes, because I couldn't just take that time and money and effort and put it on myself when I knew my family could use it for other things, until I read this quote: "There's no better investment a family can make than in the education of the mother." And I knew it was true. Whoever I became mattered immensely, to me, to my family, to the world around me. And I knew I needed to be better equipped to face these difficult challenges that kept showing up in my life. So I dove in. I took a chance. And that one decision has changed everything. It was in those classes that I was first exposed to the idea of natural law and universal governing principles. And it was here that my ideas and words were challenged. I was encouraged to ask hard questions, reason things through, look for evidence, and compare ideas. I was told to look for truth and strive for ways to build my life on it. And for the first time in my life, I wasn't just asking, "What does this author think?" or "What does this expert say I should do?" I was learning to ask, "Is this true?" What assumption is this idea resting on? What evidence supports it? What is the principle underneath it? Does that principle correspond with reality? And if it is true, what does it mean for the particular circumstances of my life? Principle or Application? Audrey: That was a completely different kind of education, because I began to realize that one of the most important distinctions we can learn to make is the distinction between a principle and an application. So I want to see how well you can make that distinction. I'm going to give you some statements, and as I read each one, I want you to decide: is this a principle or is it an application? Are you ready? Never go to bed angry. Principle or application? Have a weekly date night with your spouse. Principle or application? Spend one-on-one time with each of your children every day. Principle or application? Wake up before your children do. Principle or application? Don't let your child quit something that they've committed to. Principle or application? Have dinner together as a family every night. Principle or application? Don't argue in front of your children. Principle or application? Now, every one of these is actually an application. Every one tells you something specific that you should do. That doesn't mean they're bad ideas. Maybe having a weekly date would be wonderful for your marriage. Maybe one of your children desperately needs more individual time with you. Maybe family dinner is one of the best things your family does together. Or maybe waking up before your children makes you a much more peaceful and prepared mother. The point isn't that the applications are wrong. The point is that they aren't principles. And that distinction matters, because applications can change when circumstances change. But principles don't. Getting Underneath the Application Audrey: So how do we get underneath an application and discover the principle? One thing we might do is start asking why. So let's take "have a weekly date with your spouse." Why? Why should we do that? Well, maybe because it's important for a husband and wife to spend time together. Okay, why? Because spending time together helps strengthen their relationship. Okay, great. Why does that matter? Maybe because relationships require attention. Maybe because spouses need to know one another. Maybe because intimacy requires communication. Or because relationships deteriorate when they're consistently neglected. Do you see what's happening? We're digging underneath the application. But here's where it gets interesting. Not everything we discover by asking why is necessarily a principle. We might discover a goal: "I want a strong marriage." That's a good goal. We might discover a value: "My marriage is important to me." That's a great value. We might discover an assumption: "If my husband and I don't date every week, we're going to grow apart." That's an assumption, and it may or may not be true. You might even discover another application: "We need to spend more time talking." That's still something we're proposing that we do. So asking why is extremely useful, because it begins taking us underneath the advice. But simply asking why doesn't automatically reveal a principle. Discerning a principle requires us to keep looking for what is actually true. What Does Love Require? Audrey: Let me show you the difference, using a principle we teach very early in Level One of the Mission Driven Mom Academy. One of the first principles we introduce is: Love is the work we do to heal ourselves and others. Now notice how different that is from "have a weekly date night." "Have a weekly date night" tells you what to do. But "love is the work we do to heal ourselves and others" gives me a truth I can reason from. If that's true, then I can begin asking a completely different kind of question. What would love require here? What would actually contribute to healing myself or this other person in this particular situation? And suddenly one principle could produce many different applications. Suppose my husband and I have become disconnected. Maybe love does lead us to

  3. Oct 13

    EP 176 Everything Right and Wrong

    Thirty-two years ago I got married. And when I got married, I made a contract. It wasn't the marriage contract. (Of course I signed a marriage contract!) It was a contract with myself that I didn't realize I was making. It took me a long time to see that I had made a bargain with myself, a bargain with life, a bargain with God. And it went something like this: If I do X, then I'm going to get Y. Resources from the Episode: The Mission Driven Life: The 7 Laws of Life Mission and How to Live Them Episode 174: Why Am I Struggling?   AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 176: Everything Right and Wrong A Contract I Didn't Know I Made Audrey: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. Thank you for joining me today. Now, I want to tell you something that I did 32 years ago. I got married. And when I got married, I made a contract. And it wasn't the marriage contract. Of course, I signed a marriage contract. But I made a contract with myself that I didn't realize I was making. It took me a long time to realize that I had kind of made a bargain with myself, made a bargain with life, made a bargain with God. And it went something like this: "If I do X, then I'm going to get Y." And I put all the rules in place. Now, I didn't just do it blindly. There were people around me that had promised me that if I did certain things, I'd get certain outcomes. There were books by professionals that said, "Yes, we see that when XYZ happens in a home, or when parents do these certain things, then all of these certain outcomes happen." So for example: if I'm a loyal, dedicated wife, and faithful, and loving, then we will have a peaceful marriage. Things will go along blissfully and be great. That's one of the bargains I made with myself. One of the rules of life that I thought was real, or one of the outcomes I thought I could control. I told myself, if I live my faith and I take my kids to church every single week, and we pray all the time, and we read scripture, and we do all the things, then none of my children will struggle with their faith. [I made a deal with myself about our finances?] And if I stay home, if I work on my own education, if I homeschool them, then they'll all have perfectly beautiful relationships with each other, because they will have spent all this time together and they'll have all these shared memories, and then in their adulthood, they'll be super close. And if I teach them these certain things, then they won't have these certain problems, or we won't go through these certain pain points. It's so funny to think back on it now and to realize that I was doing that, but I really didn't understand what I was doing. I really didn't know I was doing that to myself. I just didn't realize how much I was doing. I guess looking back now, I can see that in my youthful exuberance, I was ready to make any sacrifice. I was ready to do whatever it took. I was ready to be the mom, be the wife, be the money manager, be the homeschool educator, be the friend, be the whatever. And I really thought that if I did my part, then things would go, not perfectly, but pretty great. They'd turn out pretty close to the picture that I developed in my own mind about who we were going to be 30 years from then. When Life Happened Audrey: Well, life happened and things got harder. The marriage was a struggle, and the finances were a struggle, and my children did go through hard things, because they're human and they're going to. [There was just all this pain?], and I didn't like it. And I'm a conscientious person, and I'm willing to do the work, and I'm willing to make the sacrifice, and I'm willing to say I'm sorry or regroup or read the book or whatever. And so I just figured, "Well, I must be the problem. I must have done something wrong." And I would go over my past, and I would beat myself up, and I would think about the things that I had done wrong. If we hadn't moved so much. You know, maybe if I hadn't homeschooled so much. Maybe, who knows? I don't know. A Wrong Belief Audrey: And what I didn't realize is that I was holding this really wrong belief. What was at the heart of all of this is the question that we're exploring today: "What if I do all the right things and things don't turn out right?" My belief was, if I'm a good person and I do all the right things, then we'll have this perfect outcome. Like, I will take on all of the mistakes and troubles that other people might have to have, if I need to, so that they can forgo that pain. But you know what? That's just not how life works. And what I've had to learn is that there are things that I do control and there are things that I don't control. And I know that sounds very basic. But what's hard, I think for us as moms especially, is that we have these little beings that come into our world, most often as babies, and they are completely helpless. And we have to have the wisdom to help them grow and become, and go from being 100% dependent on us to 100% self-reliant. And that is a big gap to bridge. Now, we have a lot of years to get there, but it's not always easy to know the best way to go about it. It's tough. But when I started to think about the fact that there are things I do control and things that I don't control, it really started to help me to parse out this wrong belief and make sense of it and start to acquaint myself better with the truth. What We Don't Control Audrey: Just think about all the things that we don't control. We don't control our spouse. We don't control our children. We don't control our friends. We don't control the people around us. We don't control anybody. They have their agency. No matter how old they are, they still have agency. Even if that agency is within stricter bounds, they can still choose. We don't control the circumstances that we're born into. We don't control the place, you know, the nation that we're born into, or many of the circumstances around us. We don't control the culture, the messaging, the government. There are so many things we don't control. What We Do Control Audrey: And when you think about that, and you start to really think about, "Well, okay, then what is it that I control?" the truth is really, I mostly just control me. I control my beliefs, my habits, my attitudes, my behaviors, my responses, my decisions, the way I think, the way I live, the example I set. I mostly just control me. Control Is Not the Same as Power Audrey: And this is why it's so important for us to realize this when we start thinking, because it's so easy to go down that rabbit hole. How is it that I'm doing everything right? Aren't I hitting the checklist? Didn't I have the children? Aren't I a loyal spouse? Don't I show up every day for the kids? And then things aren't working out right. Why does it look like this? Why does it look so messy? We have to remind ourselves that control is not the same as power. We don't control very much, but we have almost limitless power, because we have complete power over ourselves. And if we don't always have the power over ourselves and with ourselves that we want, we can grow into that. We can choose more of that. Why Even Bother? Audrey: And that's the answer to a question that we're tempted to ask ourselves sometimes. And that is: "Why even bother if I can't control the outcome?" And it goes back to the same point. It's because it matters immensely what you choose, because every single choice determines who you become. And who you are becoming matters immensely. It means whether or not your needs are met, the quality of life that you have every single day, the example that you're setting, the leader that you're being, the things that you're learning, the habits that you're establishing, the ways that you think and reason, the principles and truths that you live and exemplify. All of those things matter immensely. They matter to you, because when you do those things, when you develop gifts and use them in the service of others, you are the one that gets to experience the joy of that. You are the one that gets up every day and lives with yourself every moment of every day, your entire life. When you see that you have immense power and incredible potential, that is an incredible insight. And it answers that question: what do you do if you're doing all the things right and you're not getting the right outcomes? You can accept that there are things you don't control, and the outcomes are not often yours to make happen. But all the way along, you're learning. You're growing. You're becoming. Every time you make a decision and it doesn't turn out the way you want it to, you get to evaluate, and you get to grow and learn from it. Anytime you're presented with an opportunity to develop your abilities in any way, in how you think and your understanding, in new skills, new truths, new principles, you can embrace those opportunities. And then there's more of you. And then what happens is that you're taking loving actions towards yourself by deciding to discipline yourself in cooperation with God's laws, with those truths. And when you do that, you have tremendous power. And it's okay if things don't always go the way you want them to, because you always have the assurance that you are becoming through it all. And as you take those loving actions towards yourself, you're gaining in liking yourself, because you're living with you, and you really do deserve to love and like yourself. And you can remember that what you learn, and how you respond, and the quality of your relationships, and how you show up is yours: those beliefs, those actions, those responses. And what's not yours is [everybody else, and the culture, and the circumstances, and the past?]. This Week's Practice Audrey: Okay, I want you to try this this week. I want you to sit with yourself and think about some area that you're struggling

  4. Oct 6

    EP 175 Trusting Myself

    Do you ever wish you just knew? Knew whether to keep your child home or send them to school. Knew whether to take the job or make the move. A lot of women tell me that's what self-trust is: if you really trusted yourself, you would just know. I don't think that's true. And I learned it sitting alone in my car on a cold afternoon, trying to make a really big decision for our family. Resources from the Episode: The Mission Driven Life: The 7 Laws of Life Mission and How to Live Them Episode 174: Why Am I Struggling? AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 175: Trusting Myself What Is Self-Trust? Audrey: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. You know what a lot of women will say self-trust is? "Well, if you trust yourself, then you just know. You know what you should do about your child. You know whether or not you should move. You know which job you should take. You know how to manage all the things. You just somehow magically, intuitively have good discernment and good judgment and good decision-making skills. You always know what you should do, and then you really trust yourself." I want to tell you a story about when I was in a difficult situation and I had to make a pretty big decision. A Decision About My Son Audrey: I have six children, and a few years ago, at this point in our family's journey, we had two that had left home. The oldest at home was doing a modified homeschooling. He was going to the public school for a couple of classes, doing some stuff on his own, and really busy with work and music and all of his things. The next child was doing half-time school at a private school. So they were both busy with their friends. They were in their teenage years. They had educational structure around what they were doing. And then there's a big gap, about a five-year gap, and then my son. The two at the end are about 18 months apart. They're really close. My youngest daughter had just been accepted onto a gymnastics team, and she was going to start getting up early in the morning and going to the gym and then doing some alternative school stuff later in the day. Well, this left my number five, my boy. And I had a decision to make. We weren't hardcore homeschoolers, in the sense that it wasn't everybody homeschooled every year, but we were definitely very much on the alternative path. There was some charter school, there was some private school, there was some public school, there was a lot of homeschool. Most of them were home most years, but there was any variety of that. I was just always trying to be open-minded and do what seemed like it would be best for them that school year. So we have this new situation where basically the teenagers are doing their thing. I'm checking in with them. I'm around for them. But then I have this one child, and it was going to be just me and him. Now, that could be a good thing. It depends on how you frame that. And I needed to decide if I was going to send him to school or not, or if he and I were just going to be home doing our thing. There were a lot of factors that played into that decision. There were a lot of things to consider. A Different Way of Deciding Audrey: Now, of course, I did the traditional things. I talked to my husband, I talked to him, I talked to friends, I prayed, I thought about it. But what I have to tell you about this decision is that it was a turning point for me in my life. By the time I got to this decision, I was self-aware enough to know that I was going through a different decision-making process than I had in the past. I now had enough of an education, an education for real life, an education that taught me to think in terms of truths and principles and fundamentals, that my decision-making around this situation was actually fundamentally different from the way I had made decisions previously. And it was recognizable to me, so it was like a turning point. I was like: "Wow, I am going about this so differently than I used to go about making these kinds of decisions and judgments about myself and my family." Can We Always Trust Our Feelings? Audrey: Now, our culture says that you should follow your heart, that you have your own truth, that you need to trust yourself and go with your gut. And I'm not saying there isn't something to be said for listening to your intuition, and definitely your conscience. But I want to push back on that narrative, because you and I both know that we can't always trust our feelings. We can't even always trust our thoughts. We don't always know what's right and what's best, and we don't always prove to ourselves that we do. When we're trying to make decisions, sometimes we lack information. Sometimes we're afraid. Sometimes our feelings get in the way. Sometimes we're just relinquishing responsibility by letting the expert make the decision. We're pretending it's our decision, but we're actually leaning on some expert from a book, from a video, from the doctor's office, whatever it is, instead of really owning that decision for ourselves and doing the hard work of discernment and judgment and decision-making. Because this whole concept of self-trust, of having confidence in ourselves and our ability to judge and discern, of being able to grow in trusting ourselves and our decisions, is not about making the best decision every time. It's not about doing this perfectly. It's about knowing how to judge and discern from fundamentals, and knowing how to think it through in a better, more productive way, and then trusting that even if you don't get the perfect result from the decision you make right now, you can take responsibility for that decision and you can learn from whatever the outcome is. You can't always control the outcome, but you can control the decision. Blaine and His First Teacher Audrey: If you listened to the podcast last week, you heard the story of my husband Blaine learning to play the viola. One of the things I didn't go into a lot of detail about when I told that story was the first [teacher he found?] a couple of years ago, here in the DFW area. She's a super duper nice lady, a very hard worker, a very great violist, and probably, to many of her students, a good teacher. But she was brought up in Poland, and she used to tell Blaine these stories all the time about how she was taught to play viola in Poland: how they would smack her hands with a ruler and tell her she was a loser and kind of just shame her, all of these really hard things that happened to her as she was being taught. And she started at a really young age. I mean, it's been her whole life. She's a professional violist. She's a professional teacher. She's really, really good. And she's had all this teaching and instruction all of her life. And so Blaine had every reason to just completely trust her judgment, to lean into "what she said goes." And he did that for a long time. She says this is what I need. She's put me on this piece of music. She says this is what I should practice this week. I mean, he even paid her extra to practice with him every day for a few months, and they would get on Zoom calls and try to practice together. He went way above and beyond, and it was hard not to think: "I must be the problem. I really must be a lost cause. There must be no way for me to ever get good at the viola." And he had those thoughts and he had those moments. But luckily, he came back to viola at a much older age, much more mature. And he's had a wonderful education and all of these experiences. And so he looked at this situation and was able to reason and think it through. It took him a while to get to the point where he started asking questions like, "Have I really actually been given the fundamentals?" But he was definitely looking at the fruits of this experience with her. And the fruits were that he constantly felt frustrated, overwhelmed, and unsuccessful, that she just kept telling him to do more of the same, and that he had tried that for well over a year. And so he had the wisdom and the life experience to ask himself better questions as he tried to make the decision about what he was going to do. Because he could have just given up again, and it was maybe tempting for a moment to do that. He could have just said, "I'm the common denominator here. I've had another professional teacher. I just can't figure this out." But instead he started asking himself better questions, like, "How could we do this differently? What other teachers are out there? What would other teachers do? Maybe I should compare her teaching to some other teachers." And because he took the time to do that, and, like I said last time, called all these viola [teachers?] and hired two new teachers and tried them all out, he was able to trust his judgment when it finally came to, "I now have the right teacher." The lack of fruits with one teacher and the fruits with the other teacher were a huge indication that this was the right teacher for him, this was the right education, and that, just from a principled and true standpoint, she was teaching him fundamentals, and that was making all the difference for him. Not What to Think, but How to Think Audrey: This is the way in which we learn not what to think but how to think. This is so important to our ability to grow in our capacity to trust our judgments and decisions, and to make the best decision that we can, and then let go of the outcomes and not just constantly judge ourselves. I mean, one of the things that we do is say, "Well, if I had a good outcome, then I made the right decision. If it has a bad outcome, I made the wrong decision." We can't live our lives that way. It's miserable. We have to gain the capacity to trust ourselves, and to trust, like we talked about last time, that when we slow down and think and we find a truth that we know, we can then start to build plans and decisions and

  5. Sep 29

    EP 174 Why Am I Struggling?

    If you've been trying your heart out to be the very best mom or wife or steward of your health, and you're not making much progress, please stop beating yourself up. It really may not be an effort issue. Resources from the Episode: The Mission Driven Life: The 7 Laws of Life Mission and How to Live Them Episode 172: Confusion, Clarity & Vision with Jennifer Hudye  AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 174: Why Am I Struggling? Audrey: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about questions that women and mothers ask me a lot. They're questions that I've really grappled with, and I want to tackle some of those questions in the weeks to come. Things like: Why am I struggling so hard, and things don't seem to be getting better? Or, how do I trust myself more? Or, what if I do everything right and things still don't get better, or they don't go the way I want them to? These are important questions. These are hard questions. And I want to dive into that first question today and talk for a minute about why we can put in so much effort and struggle so much and work so hard, and things still don't seem to get better. Why doesn't that effort yield more fruit? So if you've ever experienced this, I want you to think about an area in your life where you struggle quite a bit, or where you feel like you've put in a lot of effort. Maybe it's in your marriage, in your parenting, in your health. Maybe you've consumed books or talked to experts or gone to therapy or taken courses, tried different practices or ideas that you found out there, and you just feel like things really aren't that much better. I want to pose a question to you, or an idea. What if you really don't need more effort? You're already doing it. You're already trying so hard. What if you actually need to learn something that you don't already know? What if you need to change the way that you think about this thing? Blaine and the Viola Audrey: I'm going to tell you a story that will really exemplify what I'm talking about here. My husband has a dad who was very into music. His family was into music. They had a family band growing up. His dad, my father-in-law, played multiple instruments. And so it was very natural in his family that when they were, you know, in elementary school or so, Dad would put each of them on an instrument. And for whatever reason, my father-in-law chose viola for Blaine. He said, "I think you would be great at viola. I think that's the perfect instrument for you." And somewhere in elementary or middle school, he handed him the viola. I think they had a couple of little introductory lessons, and that was pretty much it. Now, high school rolls around. He's played the viola a tiny bit. He's watched his dad play string instruments. He has a couple of books, and he decides he wants to get better at it. He really likes playing his viola. So he signs up for orchestra at school, but his dad won't pay for any lessons, and he doesn't have any money for lessons. So he's in the school orchestra. It's pretty small. He gets in daily practice because he's there at orchestra. He follows along. He does the best he can. He's not great at counting. He's struggling to keep up. But sometime in that school year, the orchestra teacher told all the kids that there was an all-state orchestra they could attend if they so desired. And for Blaine specifically, the teacher said, "Well, I think they have the orchestra pretty much full, but they might be able to make room for another viola. You could go check it out." So Blaine decided to go. There's something about being in the music, being in the sound, sitting amongst all of the other players and playing beautiful pieces, that is very meaningful for Blaine. It's very nutritive. He really, really, really loves it. He'd already kind of had a taste of that from high school orchestra. So he signs up, he goes to this all-state orchestra, and they put him last chair, but he doesn't care because he just wants to play. And he picks up his viola and they play some Beethoven piece. I can't remember which one it was. And he said a few notes in, he was hooked. It was a really large all-state orchestra, and they let him sit in last chair. He fumbled along. He did the best he could, but it gave him a taste, and he really, really wanted it. So that summer he decided, "Okay, well, I can't have lessons, and I've learned some this year in school. So I'm just going to practice three hours a day." This is some serious dedication and a high level of effort. So he's practicing virtually every day for three hours. He promises me it was really that long. He's doing the best he can. He sees maybe a little bit of improvement. I don't know. Not much. He goes back to high school orchestra. He stays in the all-state orchestra, close to the end of the chairs. Never really had lessons. He went to college and wanted to play viola in college. And for the first time in his life, he got a really good teacher. It was a university professor at a big, huge university. And here was his big chance. In order to be in the music program, he had to have these private lessons. And so for a year at college, he had these private lessons with this professor and made very moderate improvement. Really not a lot. Well, time goes by. [He's dating as well?] He's doing his college studies. He's kind of disenchanted because by this point, it's been four or five or six years of viola in his mind. He has finally had high-level lessons, and he just isn't very good. And it's dissatisfying, and he has other priorities. And then we marry, and then we have children, and he sets it aside. We carried this viola around with us for the next, you know, 20-plus years. He'd pick it up every now and again, play a little bit of a piece that he used to play, talk about it, dream about someday when he'd play viola again, but he never really did much about it. The Best of the Best Audrey: Well, a few years ago, he had more free time, and he decided, "I'm going to pick the viola back up. I want to do it right this time. So I'm going to get a really great teacher." So he starts asking around. We're north of Dallas, in Plano. It's a large city. And most of the biggest cities around us all have a city orchestra. There's Richardson, there's Plano, there's Frisco, I think there's McKinney, and there's the actual Dallas Symphony. There are all these symphonies around, and so there are viola players. And he started asking around among all of them, and he had a teacher that was highly recommended to him. She had all the credentials and an impressive history. Very highly recommended. She played in a couple of these city orchestras. And so she was the best of the best, right? She was going to be the best teacher he ever had. Well, pretty quickly, she jumps him into a pretty difficult piece. She tells him she wants him to compete in this local competition where you play in front of judges and you get a score. So he's playing his heart out. He's working, working, working, trying to get this piece together. He goes, and he does kind of a moderate job. Months go by, and he's trying really hard. He practices his heart out. I mean, he's practicing for about two hours a day and going to these lessons with this teacher. And after several months had gone by, he's having these conversations with me about, "This is still so hard, and I don't know if I'm improving, and I don't feel like I'm getting much better." Eventually he finds this volunteer orchestra. It's just a small volunteer orchestra, but he loves playing with them. He signs up and starts going. And with this teacher, month after month, for well over a year, I think about a year and a half, he'll practice for about two hours a day, and he'll show up, and she'll say, "Did you even practice? Why aren't you doing this better?" She would compliment him some, but sometimes she was hard on him. But she had this incredible reputation, and everybody thought highly of her. And so for a long time, he just kept telling himself: "Well, it can't be her, because she's the best of the best, and she's the best teacher I've ever had. And everybody told me she was awesome. And I'm working my butt off. I'm trying so hard, and it's just not coming together. What in the world am I going to do?" Finding the Right Teacher Audrey: And I'm listening to all of this, and I was encouraging him to look around for perhaps another teacher. Well, fast forward. He eventually finds two more teachers. He calls around to basically all of the violists in every symphony that he can find within driving distance. He asks people, "Who else do you know that teaches viola?" He gets the names of some other people that are highly recommended. He hires two other teachers while he keeps his old teacher. He tries out these new teachers. They're both significantly better than his current teacher. But one rises to the top, and he starts making progress quickly. Every week he's doing significantly better. And every week he comes home with, "Did you know there's a principle for how to hold the bow? Did you know there's a principle, or a fundamental, or a tactic, or a basic for this, that, or the other?" And this probably won't come as a surprise to you, but one of the things that this teacher said almost at the very beginning was: "You don't have the fundamentals down. You don't understand the basics. You're not playing viola in accordance with the principles that govern playing well. And so I have a trick or a strategy for all of these things, and we are just going to try things, and you're going to practice the fundamentals." He still has the volunteer orchestra, so he still has to practice the pieces for it. But rather than doing these harder pieces and practicing pieces all the time, now he's coming home doing a jillion scales and different bowing e

  6. Sep 22

    EP 173 Mission Driven Story: Martin Luther King Jr.

    I want to tell you about one powerful night in a kitchen in Montgomery, Alabama. The man at the table was twenty six years old. He had a doctorate he had just finished, a wife asleep in the next room, and a baby daughter who had just been born. He also had a movement he never asked to lead: he was voted in. And the threats had started coming, sometimes thirty or forty per day. His house had even been bombed with his wife and daughter inside. All of these realities laid heavily on him and he couldn't sleep, so he got up and made himself a cup of coffee. He never drank it. Resources from the Episode: Mothers of Creation - Provo, Utah - September 26th Episode 36: Meeting Life With Nonviolent Resistance The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau I Have a Dream, Martin Luther King Jr., March on Washington, 1963 A Way Out of No Way, Andrew Young   AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 173: Mission Driven Story: Martin Luther King Jr. My call to the ministry was not a miraculous or supernatural something. On the contrary, it was an inner urge, calling me to serve humanity. Introduction AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, founder of The Mission Driven Life and author of The Mission Driven Mom. Martin Luther King Jr. was a truly mission driven man, and he exemplifies a theme that we're talking about over these months through the summer and into the fall, and that is true vision. A real visionary, someone who knew what vision was and held onto it all his life. AUDREY: I want to talk to you about some of the amazing things that he did that we're not as aware of nowadays, and point you to his autobiography. It is not technically an autobiography. It is a compilation put together by someone after he died from all original sources: his speeches, his journals, his letters, refocused into the first person. But it all comes originally from him, and it's in chronological order. It is beautiful. I loved reading it. I have watched many of his speeches and read articles and a couple of other books. Letter from Birmingham Jail is one of my favorites of all time. AUDREY: There are some incredible stories and experiences I'm going to share with you, and I'm going to read some selections from his autobiography because he says it far better than I could. Reading it really nurtured my soul. It increased my faith. It told of miraculous experiences. A Caveat AUDREY: I'm going to give you one little caveat at the beginning: he is a controversial figure in some people's eyes. Two things I think are important to point out. One is that some of his closest friends did say after he died that he had affairs. There are FBI tapes under lock that will come out, I think, next year. AUDREY: I can't speak to any of that. I don't know. I do know that the FBI did things that even the most conservative individual thinks are pretty shady, and I don't know how that interaction played back and forth. I don't know what they have under lock and key or what will come out. Maybe there is a chance that Martin Luther King Jr. wasn't exactly the man he positioned himself to be. But I do know that what he writes about rings true to me. I know that the principles he dedicated his life to served beautiful purposes and beautiful ends. He lifted our nation. He made our nation better through the vision that he held and the way that he sacrificed himself for it. So I don't want to discard all the good that he was and all the good that he did. I want to share with you the experiences that are undisputed, that we know actually happened, the things we know he said and did that I believe are truly admirable and worth learning about and worth looking up to him for. AUDREY: I also had a conversation with someone recently that was very fascinating. They were saying they think maybe he wasn't really peace loving and didn't really practice nonviolent resistance. That seemed very bizarre to me. I was like, we have videotapes. We have evidence of that kind of thing. Like anything, we're rewriting history. We're telling the bad parts of the story and not always the good parts. I just want to share with you the things that have elevated and inspired me, the truths I know he teaches, and what we know for sure: that he made a conscious choice to give his life for his vision, and he did bring that about to the betterment of the people around him and our nation, and I truly believe, probably the world. AUDREY: This isn't meant to be a full picture of everything about him. It's a mission driven story in the sense that he was a man truly dedicated to some true principles, and he lived those out. He did love God. He did everything he could to try to love humanity. He did love his family. If he had some faults, some weaknesses, some committed sins, I can't speak to that. But he did exemplify many of those mission driven qualities, and he was, for sure, a true visionary who changed the world. Childhood in Atlanta AUDREY: He was born in January of 1929. He had, in his own words, a marvelous father and mother. They didn't argue much or have very many falling outs, and they were very significant in determining his religious attitudes. He said: It is quite easy for me to think of a God of love mainly because I grew up in a family where love was central and where loving relationships were ever present. AUDREY: He said this made him a more optimistic person: "I lean more toward optimism than pessimism about human nature because of my childhood experiences." And he also says, "I think that my strong determination for justice comes from the very strong, dynamic personality of my father, and I hope that the gentle aspect comes from a mother who is very gentle and sweet." AUDREY: He tells about an experience he had with a little boy when he was young: From the age of three, I had a white playmate who was about my age. We always felt free to play our childhood games together. He did not live in our community, but he was usually around every day; his father owned a store across the street from our home. At the age of six, we both entered school, separate schools, of course. I remember how our friendship began to break as soon as we entered school. This was not my desire, but his. The climax came when he told me one day that his father had demanded that he would play with me no more. I never will forget what a great shock this was to me. I immediately asked my parents about the motive behind such a statement. We were at the dinner table when the situation was discussed, and here, for the first time, I was made aware of the existence of a race problem. I had never been conscious of it before. AUDREY: He was middle class in Atlanta. They lived, I guess, in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and those were the people he mostly associated with. But he saw no color differences. It didn't make a difference to him what color this little boy was. They were just friends. As my parents discussed some of the tragedies that had resulted from this problem, and some of the insults they themselves had confronted on account of it, I was greatly shocked, and from that moment on I was determined to hate every white person. As I grew older and older, this feeling continued to grow. My parents would always tell me that I should not hate the white man, but that it was my duty as a Christian to love him. The question arose in my mind: how could I love a race of people who hated me and who had been responsible for breaking me up with one of my best childhood friends? This was a great question in my mind for a number of years. AUDREY: He always had a resentment toward the system of segregation. His mother talked to him about slavery and about the Civil War, and she tried to explain the divided system of the South as a result of that: the segregated schools, restaurants, theaters, housing, drinking fountains, waiting rooms and bathrooms, as a social condition rather than a natural order. So she tried to explain, this isn't how things need to be. This isn't how God intends them to be. This is how humans are making it for each other. She made it clear that she opposed this system and that I must never allow it to make me feel inferior. Then she said the words that almost every Black southerner hears before he can yet understand the injustice that makes them necessary: "You are as good as anyone." AUDREY: So at a very young age, he has this really great friendship with this little white boy. He believes that we can all get along and be friends, and then it's shattered in this revelation at age six. His parents try to help him through it and help him see the truth about it, but he really, really struggles. AUDREY: He learned a lot from his father too. He says: The thing I admire most about my dad is his genuine Christian character. He is a man of real integrity, deeply committed to moral and ethical principles. He is conscientious in all of his undertakings. Even the person who disagrees with his frankness has to admit that his motives and actions are sincere. AUDREY: His father was the pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, and he wielded great influence in the community and perhaps won the grudging respect of some whites. He says, "With this heritage, it is not surprising that I had also learned to abhor segregation, considering it both rationally inexplicable and morally unjustifiable." AUDREY: What the Civil Rights Movement owes to Martin Luther King Jr., we also owe to his parents. They were the ones who pulled themselves up, got some education, became leaders in the community, and lived this middle class lifestyle. They believed in Christian love in the face of social injustice, even though they were the ones being acted against. They instilled in King a love for all mankind, or tried to at least, and tried to help him see that the system was broken, but

  7. Sep 15

    EP 172 Confusion, Clarity & Vision with Jennifer Hudye

    Have you ever imagined how things would turn out in the future—the perfect man you'd marry, the beautifully obedient children you'd have— and then, years later, when things were messy and hard, you wondered what had gone wrong?  I did.  And what I had to learn was that the image I was holding all that time was not a vision. It was an expectation.  Resources from the Episode: Mothers of Creation - Provo, Utah - September 26th Vision Driven Global - Jennifer Hudye's company Vivid Vision - the Vivid Vision process, and the free Vivid Vision Mindmap with question prompts and templates for building your three-year vision Conscious Copy & Co. - Jennifer's messaging and copywriting company AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 172: Confusion, Clarity & Vision with Jennifer Hudye Introduction AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I’m Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. I’m honored to have Jennifer Hudye with us today. AUDREY: I’ll read a tiny bit about her. She’s the founder and CEO of Vision Driven, which sounds awesome and very much aligns with us: a company devoted to helping people get crystal clear on their next big vision and then actually live into it. In 2016, she partnered with Cameron Herold, the author of Vivid Vision and a top coach to CEOs and COOs, and became a driving force behind the Vivid Vision process. Since then, she and her team have guided more than 2,000 companies, many run by leaders like Tony Robbins, Joe Polish, and Brendon Burchard, in crafting a compelling picture of their future. I also know you have a sister company called Conscious Copy & Co., where you help business leaders and individuals get their messaging out through copy. And I thought it was fascinating that you’ve been doing this almost since you started walking, building businesses in your teen years, launching them and selling them. You’ve had a bit of a wild ride, a different adventure than the average person, so I was really excited to talk to you about all of that. AUDREY: Before we dive in, I want to read a little section from the book Vivid Vision. I’ll tell you in a bit how I got my hands on it and why it’s been so helpful to me personally. Moms especially, as I read this paragraph, I want you to replace the word “organization” or “company” with “family,” and think about your own family culture. No one else in your organization [family] knows with any certainty what it is you want to build. At best, they guess. If you want your team [family] to build what you see, you must provide them with the means of understanding it. Otherwise, you will get different ideas of what to build. Everyone will grasp a different part, but no one will put it all together. No one will comprehend what it is you want to build as a whole. The result? Confusion. Everyone will have a unique, subjective experience, drawing a picture that looks nothing like anyone else’s. AUDREY: In other words, your family is without alignment. So before we get to the concept of vision, which I want you to define for us, I’d love to start with this word: confusion. I saw one of your videos where you talked about what confusion is, and it was fascinating. I think if we talk about confusion the way you teach it, it will help us contrast it with vision. What Confusion Really Is JENNIFER: First off, thank you so much for having me, Audrey. I’m grateful to be here. My definition of confusion is thinking you should know something, but you don’t. AUDREY: Wow. JENNIFER: Confusion oftentimes has two components. The first is getting caught up in the how of something before you’ve ever identified the what, the where, and the why. Say you want to go on a cross-country road trip. You start driving, but you haven’t plugged in a destination. Then you start to feel this sense of confusion: “I don’t even know how I’m going to get there.” Well, have you identified where you’re going in the first place? We do this in so many places in our lives. JENNIFER: The second component is fear: the internal story we tell ourselves about why we can’t have what we want. I’ve guided over 10,000 people and leaders through the Vivid Vision process over the last decade, and I can tell you that more often than not, it’s either the how or fear, but the fear is underneath it. Confusion can be a really convenient cover-up for avoiding the truth. AUDREY: Yes. JENNIFER: Because what if you state what it is that you want, and then you don’t get it? AUDREY: You don’t get it. That’s right. JENNIFER: What does that mean about you? So we have these fears running in the background, and we label them as confusion. We label them as being stuck, because that’s actually more convenient than knowing what we want. Because if we know what we want, then we have to be responsible to the knowing. [Speaker to verify against audio: the next paragraph may be Jennifer continuing rather than Audrey.] AUDREY: And then when we fall short, it’s a new way for us to be a failure. It lowers our status in our own eyes and creates even more self-deprecation and that horrible self-talk. And we don’t want to go there. So fascinating. Abraham Maslow, in one of his books I love, has a chapter called “The Need to Know and the Fear of Knowing.” I think that’s what you’re pointing to: we need to know, but we’re afraid to know, because knowing anything makes us responsible for that knowing. And the truth can liberate us. That’s a core idea we talk a lot about at The Mission Driven Mom, that the truth has the power to make us free. But often that truth is painful, and it must be faced and championed. That’s the work. The Opposite of Clarity JENNIFER: On the topic of confusion and being stuck, I’ve found a lot of people think the opposite of clarity is confusion. I haven’t seen that, working with clients or in my own experience. The opposite of clarity is the unknown. Clarity is the known: I have the information, the education, and the insight within myself to make a decision and move forward. The unknown is the opposite. I don’t have the information, the education, or the insight. It’s the open void. But there isn’t emotional baggage that comes along with the unknown. JENNIFER: For example, when I went to college, I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I’m partially dyslexic and I hate reading, which is ironic because I ended up building a writing company. In my first year I took some law classes and realized, wow, I really hate this. This is not for me. So for about two years, I didn’t know what I wanted, but I wasn’t emotionally distressed about it. I thought, okay, I just need to go try things, see what I like, and that will give me some clues about what I do want. JENNIFER: As moms, or as we get older, we understand that for kids. We give them a lot of grace in those periods where they don’t know what they want. We say, no problem, go try what’s on the buffet menu, go have experiences. But then we don’t give ourselves that grace. And so we get locked in confusion, which is that middle ground between the known and the unknown: thinking we should know something, but we don’t. And that’s like an e-brake on our own evolution. Vision vs. Expectation AUDREY: Wow, that’s profound. And I think it’s exacerbated by our social media age, where you look out into the void and it looks like other people know what you think you should know. That creates even more internal turmoil: why haven’t I arrived? AUDREY: I’d love to hear your thoughts on something. I know this personally because I’ve done it many times myself: I thought I was setting a vision, but I was actually setting an expectation. How would you distinguish between clarity, vision, and expectation? I feel like those words get jumbled into one thing, and we think they’re all the same, but they’re very different, and knowing the difference can help us. How would you define vision and hold it as something separate? JENNIFER: That’s a great question. I think of expectation as how it needs to look in the process of getting somewhere. There’s a little bit of a white-knuckle grip on it, and a deflection from reality. AUDREY: Yes. JENNIFER: The definition of vision is simply a painted picture of something in the future. If you were to take a time machine into the future, what do you want it to look like, and how do you want to feel? You can do that in different time frames. I think there’s a lot of value in a ten-year vision. In our process, we use three years. JENNIFER: But I think it’s so important to hold that vision lightly, to say, “I would like this reality, or something better,” knowing that we don’t have all the insight and sometimes life will redirect us somewhere even better than we could have imagined. Whereas expectation says it needs to look this way, and it needs to look this way in how I get there. It’s almost like getting in the way of this amazing energy called life, because we think we know better. Which I have done. Anyone listening who’s thinking, “I’ve done that,” I’ll put both my hands up. AUDREY: Yes. One hundred percent. And I hadn’t thought about it quite this way until you explained it, but what I see in myself and in the women I work with is that expectation is often a stumbling block, whereas vision creates forward movement. I think expectation is a stumbling block because expectations are often completely arbitrary. They don’t come from a place of knowing, like you’re talking about. You’re not learning how to get there. You’re not being intentional. You’re layering life with something you hope is going to show up, but it’s not part of a plan. You don’t know how it’s going to come about, or you don’t have a clear sense of the reality and what you’d need to know to get there. AUDREY: A vision is a very intentional pro

  8. Sep 8

    EP 171 Vision Panel: Mothers of Creation Speakers

    Have you ever had someone you love decide to walk out of your life?  Cadie did. Someone very close to her decided a few years back that they didn't want to be in her life any longer, and there's been no contact since. While Cadie was sharing with us her pain and struggle over this loss, we all had a profound realization: Even though she has no contact with this person, Cadie still has a relationship with them!  Resources from the Episode: Mothers of Creation Conference - Provo, Utah - September 26th The Power of TED - David Emerald's work on the creator orientation and the empowerment dynamic Tracie references The Karpman Drama Triangle - Stephen Karpman's original framework for the victim, rescuer, and persecutor roles Episode 159: The Six Victim Types with Lindsey Wright  Episode 166: Creator Orientation, A Panel Discussion  Episode 169: What Vision Actually Is  AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT Episode 171: Vision, A Panel Discussion Introduction AUDREY: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. So happy to have you back with us again today. We have our beautiful panel of upcoming speakers for our Mothers of Creation event this fall. We've got Tracie Hyde, Lindsey Wright, and Cadie Hatch with me. Today we're going to talk about the final key theme of this event, and of this whole process of moving from our problem stories and the places where we feel immensely stuck to really moving forward, having some serious success, and making things different on a long-term basis. AUDREY: We've talked about the victim types, and how understanding them creates a spark and turns us on to the fact that we are being a victim and we need to be different. We've talked about how creator orientation gives us new hope. Cadie talked about how it makes us feel liberated, and Lindsey talked about how it helps her feel relief, like a new beginning, turning toward others, all of these beautiful things. But then how do we maintain it? We get that we're acting like a victim, and that we could be a creator instead, and we want to be that. Vision is at the heart of how we stay there. It's how we get to the end result. So let's start by putting some words around what we mean when we say vision. How would you describe that? What Do We Mean by Vision? TRACIE: Vision is something we hold in our mind that we have done the work to spiritually create before we bring it into the world. It's something we have in the forefront of our mind. In victim mode, we're reacting to problems, and the problems pop up like whack-a-mole and we're just whacking them down. But with vision, we actually have something we carefully and intentionally created in our mind that we are walking toward, working toward. AUDREY: That's a beautiful description. Any other thoughts or descriptions around that? We've talked in previous podcasts about how sometimes our expectations and our ideals can get us into trouble. So what's the difference between an expectation and this idea of vision? Vision Versus Expectation LINDSEY: The culture can say, just envision it. If you want a million dollars and an island in the Bahamas, just imagine it and then it will happen. That's not what we mean. For me, vision is based in reality, meaning it isn't unrealistic. It's based on principles. It's something that, like Tracie said, we've spiritually created. This thing we're holding in the mind, this way we want to show up in the world. But it's realistic. AUDREY: I would add one other little caveat, and I think it's what you're getting at, Lindsey. It's within the realm of our control. One of the things that really trips me up in the expectation realm is two things. One, I have to remind myself that if my expectations are higher than God's, then I'm in the realm of the impossible and the ridiculous. But also that I can't have expectations for other people. I can only have expectations around my responses and my creations. Those are the things I can hold and that I can control. So that would be part of how I would flesh out what we mean by vision. Cadie, you were going to add something. CADIE: That was what I was going to say. I can have a vision of what I want my relationships to look like, but I can't control what the other person in the relationship is going to want or do next. It's unrealistic for me to force that on them. So a question I have been finding helpful is, what kind of person do I need to be to live this vision I'm thinking about? I can't control their response, but I can control mine. Who do I want to be as I get older? What kind of person do I want to be? What would that look like in this relationship? Then it's all my responsibility to be that person. AUDREY: Great point. Another word that's used in some of the sources we're using to prepare this event is outcome. Fear Versus Faith AUDREY: Cadie, Tracie has given the example in past podcasts and past discussions about her family gatherings. Maybe she knows what she doesn't want. One of the words we haven't used yet is fear versus faith. I think that's a very important fundamental difference here. When we're in the victim mentality, we're very fearful. You can see threads of this if you go back and listen to the ways we described problem stories and problem situations. There are a lot of fears about what we're going to do, what other people will think, how we're not going to show up and be enough, all of that. Creator orientation is a place of faith, and faith is a principle of action and power. So we're taking action around a predetermined outcome. The reason Tracie kept talking about this spiritual creation is because we've gone to the work of deciding what it is we want instead. AUDREY: So much of what's happening in victim is that something has happened in life. We've been in an accident, or someone has betrayed us, and it's something we didn't want to have happen to us. In that sense we are kind of a victim of life, but we don't want to be in victim orientation. We want to take that experience, turn it into a challenger, and show up as a creator. But we cannot do that without determining what we want instead, now that these are my new circumstances. When my father passed suddenly when I was sixteen years old, that was my new circumstance. There was no going back. There was no changing it. There was only accepting it and creating new visions and outcomes of who I was going to be, how I was going to show up for the people around me, how I was going to be in my family. Vision is that outcome we predetermine, that we spiritually create, like Tracie kept saying. We hold it in our mind. We cling to it to keep us in that creator orientation. Willing to Do the Work LINDSEY: I love what Cadie said about holding this creation in our mind, this outcome. But we're also willing to do the work. We're willing to act in faith. We're willing to take responsibility. So the vision is based on reality, and it's based on what we can actually control, but we're also willing to do the work. We don't just set the vision and then expect it to happen. We're taking the responsibility to make it happen. [Speaker attribution uncertain in this passage. Voice matches Lindsey’s earlier "based in reality" language, but verify against audio.] AUDREY: That's a good component of vision. And creating the vision is a big part of taking ownership. We can't just decide to stay a creator. If we don't do the work to build out a new vision for ourselves in this new reality we find ourselves in, then we will flip back into [victim] orientation. There's no other way for it to go, because we don't know why we're being a creator. We lose sight of it constantly, and those negative emotions and reactions to a situation we didn't choose, or don't like, are going to overwhelm us if we're not hanging on to a new vision for ourselves, our lives, our way of being. It's indispensable to staying in creator orientation. [The recording says "flip back into creator orientation" here. Corrected to victim, which is clearly what was meant. Confirm before publishing.] Cadie’s Story: A Relationship With No Contact CADIE: If I could share a little experience on this, I would love to. I have a person in my life who I have a very close relationship with. Some years ago this person decided they didn't want to be involved in my life anymore. You might be able to say in some terms that this person abandoned our relationship. When that happened, it was a pretty traumatic experience for me, and I felt like I legitimately was the victim of that circumstance. And I didn't want to be. CADIE: One of the ways I know I am in drama is that I obsess over the same event over and over. It gets replayed over and over. That's a huge part of victim. That's all I thought about. When I didn't have to be thinking of anything else, that was what I was thinking about. So I knew I was stuck, because victims are always stuck. And I wanted to change that. It took me a long time to be able to change it. MDM is such a wonderfully faith based community, and there are some circumstances in which I could not get out of victim by myself. On that one I had to turn to God and ask him to help me. He got me out of victim on that one. CADIE: However, just like Audrey was saying, I can easily flip back into victim if I dwell on that problem. But the thing that keeps me out of it is this idea of a vision of what that relationship could look like someday. I cannot control this other person at all. But like I was saying before, what kind of person do I need to be so that if this person came back to me, we could start a relationship again? I need to be the kind of person who has an open heart and is willing to forgive. I need to be the kind of person who is able to have maybe challenging conversations, but with empathy and love. I can't control the other person, but my vision is of who I want to be. [Unrecoverable

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For moms and women who want to increase their confidence, and discover and develop their unique gifts, while strengthening themselves and their families. *Over 50 5-Star Reviews*

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  • Creator
    Audrey Rindlisbacher
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    178
  • Rating
    Clean
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    © 2026 Copyright 2025 The Mission Driven Mom Podcast
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    The Mission Driven Mom Podcast

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