But we have a lot of mind drama. We have a lot of mine drama that steals our peace. And one of the ways that I ask myself, if I’m on the path to sainthood, I like to picture it like an actual path, you know, like the yellow brick road and I can be on it. And then sometimes I have one foot off of it or just a little bit off. And then sometimes I’m completely off of it. But on the path of sainthood, one of the ways that I know that I’m on the path is by the fruits of the holy spirit and through the fruits of the holy spirit. I can find evidence that I’m walking the path to sainthood. Do I have peace? Do I have joy? Do I have self-control? All right. So the, the fruits of the holy spirit will show you if you are walking with the Lord patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness.

Now obviously we step off the path a lot every day. Okay? So I’m not saying, Hey, if you’re not living with peace, joy, and kindness all time, you’re bungling it. Not at all. These are just guides. They’re just showing us, Hey, you’re not walking with the Lord at this moment, right? When we find ourselves being impatient and angry or snapping at the kids, we just know in that way, the moment that we are not walking with or trusting the Lord that we’re having some mind drama. Okay? And that’s the work that we do here at made for greatness and in our master’s program is we teach women how to find the mind drama that’s keeping and them from staying on the path to sainthood. Okay? So we have something very exciting coming up. We are releasing a very beautiful, powerful workbook called beloved. And in this workbook, we are going to teach you how to love yourself.

And we mean truly love yourself, the way that God loves you. And there are a ton of ways that we do this. But one of the very first things that we ask you to do in the workbook is to identify the two voices that are inside your head. Hey, so the first voice that you’re going to identify is your mean girl voice. Okay? There’s a mean girl, inside your head who wants to keep you stuck? Who tells you that you’re terrible at everything who tells you your body looks gross. No one really likes you. You’re not part of the cool kids wreck of a mom. You don’t know how to take care of the house, right? Your mean, girl says all sorts of terrible things to you. Now I happened to know that the mean girl, part of your brain just wants you to be safe. I want you to lock yourself up in a closet and never go anywhere. So you don’t experience any pain.

Yeah. Toxic relationship, but she does love you. And so one of the things that we ask you to do is to name your mean girl. My mean girl’s name is Mitch. And you want to begin to kind of create a character around this voice, this voice that says mean things to you all the time. Because one of the things that you’re going to learn in our program and here on this podcast is you are not your thoughts. You are the watcher of your thoughts. And so when we can create a character around your mean girl, and we can really begin to see her. So clearly when she starts talking to us, we feel separate from her. We can just watch her listened to her talk thing and we can engage with her. Okay. We don’t have to hear her thoughts and think that they are true or that they make up who we are.

So we ask you to sit down and prayer and think about what your mean girl’s name is and to create a description of her. So my mean, girl, her name is Mitch and she’s kinda judgy. And she, it’s kinda like, she’s always smoking cigarettes and drinking a fancy martini and she’s beautiful. And she’s blonde. It was so interesting when I asked my myself, well, what does she look like? I knew exactly what she looked like. And she’s kind of like sitting in this chair, like at a beautiful country club. And she says things to me like, you’re never going to be good enough. I told you no one would want that. Your husband’s never really going to love you for who you are. You’ll always be a disappointment. And she’s kind of like this popular country, Cub lady. And she always makes me feel like I’m never going to be allowed in the club. Like, oh sweetie, that’s so sweet that you thought you were going to get to be here, but you just aren’t good enough. Yeah. Look at that dress you’re wearing.

Yeah.

You don’t even know how to have nice things or to get, to be, be part of this club. Right. She always makes me feel like I’m never going to have the things I really want. She’s like, you’re good. You can do some things, but you don’t get to be at the table. You don’t get to be at the special club. And she always tells me that I’m ugly and she sounds terrible. Right. But most of us have this. All of us, all of us have a mean girl in our mind, but here’s, what’s incredibly powerful about imagining her and giving her a name is you’ll start to notice when she is talking. You’ll actually start to hear the thoughts in a slightly different way. And it makes you feel so much more safe because you realize, oh, Mitch is talking to me. I’m going to tell you how we talk back to mention a minute.

Okay. But then there’s this other voice that you have in your brain. Okay. This is your St voice. Okay. Your St. Voice is your voice of reason. It’s your voice. That’s walking with the holy spirit. Remember the holy spirit lives inside of us. So we always have access to divine truth pain. And so when we are, I like to think holding hands with the holy spirit. Okay, you’re going to hear your St. Voice. So I have named mice St. Stella, like Stella, Maurice, our lady starved the sea. I saw this beautiful print from slay folk homes. Oh, is that what it is? I’ll put the link in the notes and it was this beautiful picture. It was a painting, um, of our lady in the sea and she had red hair and she’s never depicted that way. And I was just so in love with this.

And, um, and so I knew as soon as I was going to name this voice, that that was going to be her name’s Stella and Stella speaks in a soft and lovely voice. It’s always soothing. And it always feels like love. And even when she asked me to do difficult things, I know she believes in me and she feels like a wonderful mother or a wise mentor. And she’s a boss lady like Zelie Martin. Right. And she knows that she can love God and educate her children and have a successful business. And she laughs and she knows how to have fun. She doesn’t take things too seriously. She always reminds me to bring the Lord into what I’m doing and to pray. And she encourages me to go to adoration and to pray the rosary. She says things like Sterling. Remember that always makes you feel better.

Let’s do that. It reminds me to be present in whatever I’m doing. And she makes me feel calm. And that piece notices how different that voice is, then Midge’s voice. Okay. But I’m telling you, it’s goofy to give names to these voices and to picture them as characters. But when you do this, you’re going to begin to hear which voice is speaking to you in your mind right now, obviously all of the voices are our voices, but what this is is it’s the difference between your prefrontal cortex brain, which is your thinking brain, your logical brain, that’s your Saint brain. The one who’s calm. The one who’s like let’s make a plan, right? Versus our fight or flight brain. That’s just freaked out all the time and doesn’t want us to experience any more pain or it thinks, you know, let’s experience the familiar pain of beating ourselves up because that seems better than the pain of rejection or the pain of fear failure. So sometimes that part of our brain even chooses pain, but if she was comfortable pain or familiar pain.

And so I want to invite you to do this, not while you’re listening to the podcast, take some time, you know, be in a quiet space, pray, and I want you to really pay attention to how each of these voices sound. And you’re going to notice it for the rest of the day. You’re going to notice a nice voice and then not so nice voice. And it’s okay because you were the watcher of your thoughts. You are not your thoughts. And so both of these characters can speak to you. They’re going to tell you things, they’re going to suggest things and you get to decide what you want to think, believe and do.

So you don’t even have to do everything that the same voice says, right? You may choose not to, but you have the power to choose. And when we talk about wanting to be empowered women, I think we get kind of a mixed, messy message about that from feminism. And it doesn’t look great. A lot of times when I hear people talking about being an empowered woman, but actually I think that at the heart of it being an empowered woman is someone who controls her response. She controls the way she shows up and the way she does that is by controlling her thinking.

And so the first step to controlling your thinking is to slow down and hear your thinking. And I find for me and with my clients, it’s a lot easier to hear it. When we name these two voices who is speaking right now and what does she want? And then later in the workbook, we go through an exercise where we actually introduced the two of them, because they’re going to be best friends. They’re going to be together forever with you. You’re never going to get rid of either one of them. It’s not like you could do enough mindset work. That the mean girl goes away. She is along for the ride. It’s like you’re in the car. And both of them are in the backseat. Sometimes we let one of them come into the front seat and they’re a little bit louder and they can tell us things, but we are the ones who drive and decide where we’re going. Okay. And when we’re doing it well, we’re doing that through prayer and through discerning what God wants for us. And oftentimes the St. Voice is the voice of reason and is leading us to the path of sainthood.

That’s our calm brain who trusts in the Lord, but that still also requires belief that you can know the will of God and that he speaks to you. You have to believe that in order to be on the right path. And that’s why we teach you that in the no goals, goals program, right? That’s one of the very first things we teach women in masters. If they want to begin with goals is we teach them that they have the ability to hear God. He tells us what to do. So once you create that belief, then when your St voice comes in, she will come in and tell you. But remember when we were praying, God said this, and you’ll be able to think, oh, you’re right. He did say that I’m to stay on this path. And the mean girl will go, no, we got to get off this path. It looks scary. We don’t know what’s around the corner. I don’t like it. And you could say, oh, Mitch, I see that. You’re really worried right now. And that’s okay. I know you love me and you want to keep me safe, but I trust in the Lord. And he is leading us to this path right now. So it’s going to be fine. Whatever’s there. I can handle it.

So I want to give you an example of how this, how these voices might come into play and how you could kind of respond to them. So let’s say that one of your children comes home from some sort of social event came and the child looks really sad and rejected and says, oh, mom, my friends didn’t want to play with me. Nobody likes me. Now. It’s very natural that you would have a fear response. You’re watching your baby. She looks hurt. You just want to fix it. And part of your worries, oh no. What if I haven’t taught her some social niceties? What if she doesn’t fit in, in your brain is like pretty quickly cataloging all of the moments that you didn’t fit in and that you felt rejected or hurt by school mates or friends, or even, you know, cousins and siblings. And so this is where your mean girls going to come in. Oh no, you screwed it up. You better say the right thing. If you don’t say the perfect thing in this moment, you’re going to screw up her whole social life. She’s going to be, you know, a cat lady in her apartment all by herself.

And your mean, girl will say, you did this. Maybe you didn’t teach her enough manners. Right? And so your mean, girl will stir up a ton of fear and anxiety and pressure. And I think as moms, we think that we can hide that from our kids. That if we smile and use a calm voice, that they can’t tell that we’re anxious or worried, but the human brain is very, very good at reading micro, oh, what’s the word? It’s like micro movements in the face. And even if they’re not consciously picking it up, they’re subconsciously picking up that you seem upset. And of course they don’t know why. They just think you’re upset. And most children, when they think their parents are upset, think that it’s their fault.

Even in this situation, it would seem so normal to say to, for, you know, for us to think, oh honey, I’m just upset that you’re sad. I’m not upset that you did anything wrong. Right. But children almost always think, oh, I’ve done something wrong. Must’ve been me. So again, your mean girl voice is going to show up and make you feel scared. Pressure anxious, maybe sad, but your St. Voice can come in and say, oh, I see that your little girl is sad. Oh, that is so hard as parents, when our children are hurting, but this is totally normal. This is exactly how we teach children. How to have friends in moments like these. And we help them interpret what happened the best way that we can. We help them to know that God loves them, that they are wonderful, and that God will bring wonderful friends into their lives.

And we just sit with them. We don’t think anything is wrong. We think this is my moment to be a mom, just going to sit with this little girl. And I’m going to make her feel loved. It’s totally normal. This is just one of those parenting milestones. Listen to my voice, listen to how calm it sounds. Listen how different it sounds than the mean girl. And when we have the ability to slow down and to hear the different voices in our minds, we can make better decisions. We can show up in the way that we want. We can go, Mitch, thank you for your input. Your opinions are noted, but she’s not us. She, she’s not going to go to a yucky middle school and get picked on and teased. I know this is making you remember that. And you’re feeling really scared and upset, but it’s okay.

And then we can talk to the same voice. Thank you. Those are such good ideas. Thank you for calming me down and helping me out. And I don’t always do this in my mind. I would say most of the time, I’m just talking to Mitch and I’m like, Mitch, I love you or chill out. We’re going to be fine. I see that. You’re worried, but this is our moment. This is supposed to be happening. We’re here for this. God guided us here. So I don’t know that I speak to my St voice as much because when my same voice is happening, that is just how I want to live. I want to be calm. I want to be loving. I want to believe in myself. Yeah.

And again, one of the ways that I’m kind of always checking myself against how I’m showing up in my life, goes back to the fruits of the holy spirit. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And when I find myself stepping off the path, it’s totally fine. That happens all the time. I just notice. And I try to bring myself back into the path. How can I have love and joy and peace in this situation? Right? You could have joy by acknowledging that it’s a wonderful thing that your child even sharing this with you, right? You have to have created a certain amount of safety and relationship for a child to bring something like this to you. And that could fill you with joy.

So I want you to pay attention to your thinking. I want you to give your mean girl, a name. I want you to really picture what she looks like. And I want you to give your St voice a name. I’m really picture what she looks like. And she could look like you, by the way, she could just be the same version of you. You know, she just might look like a, a slightly flawless glowy version of you, but it’s important to separate out these two voices, which is the voice that comes from fear and anxiety and shame. And which is the voice that comes from peace and love. And patience.

First step is just having awareness around these voices. Then you will begin to choose to think things on purpose. And when you begin to think things on purpose, it will change your behavior. And when we change our behavior, we get different results in our lives. And that is why most of you are here. Most of you have been drawn to this podcast because there is something you want to change in your life. Maybe you’ve tried to change it before. Maybe you’ve never even tried because you were scared. But I say this a lot. If you have a desire in your heart, a deep desire, it comes from God. I was explaining this to my seven year old the other day. And I said, is it a deep desire in your heart from God that you want chocolate? And she laughed. And she said, no. And she loves playing the violin.

So that was the thing that she, she said, I know God wants me to play the violin because I have that desire in my heart. And I said, yes, that’s exactly right. When we have desires in our hearts, real and deep desires that come from peace and they always come from God. But that also means he’s going to fulfill them. So I want you to have hope. I want you to have hope that you are here right now, and that God led you to this podcast and that you have some hope that he is going to fulfill the desires of your heart. And you do not need to know how that’s his business. You just need to trust in him that you are his daughter, and he loves you so much. He delights in you. That is the other thing that we talk about in this beautiful workbook.

We have an entire section on learning how to delight in yourself. Most of us have no idea how to do that. Most of us don’t even know what we like anymore. And so we’re going to help you discover that and be delighted in the unique way that God made you. So if that sounds interesting to you, if you want to work more on understanding these voices in your mind and loving yourself, delighting in yourself and seeing yourself really the way that God sees you, then I want to encourage you to join us in masters. Make sure you’re in before July 1st, because that’s when we will be taking this program live. And I can’t wait to see what all of the women in our program discover. It’s so fun. And Wednesday we celebrate wins. And I love seeing what everybody has to say. The wins they’ve had in motherhood, the wins they’ve had with their husbands, the ones they’ve had with their work or discovering a passion and just taking care of themselves. That’s what we teach you in masters. And it is a beautiful thing. So come join us. If that sounds interesting to you, be in there before July 1st, and we’re going to do this amazing workbook together.

Mama, it’s going to show you that you were made for greatness.