20. Seeing Joy as Your Lens, Not a Reward as a Mom and Business Owner: 5 Part Transformation Series

This 5 part series starts with the end vision result. The overwhelm you may be experiencing as both a mom and business owner serving in many roles. Imagine seeing joy throughout the day and not waiting to earn it or experience it later. Later isn't the moment where joy happens. This is such a backwards idea. everything is happening now, in this exact moment. What a gift to experience it and allow the positive ripple affect.

"A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones."

Proverbs 17:22

Takeaways from this episode:

-Time to slow down

-Allow yourself to take a new path

-Honor your desires by listening to them

Resources for this episode:

-If you found value in this episode, please make sure to:

✨️Start here by going to my website, scroll down & sign up for my free T.I.M.E. Private Mamas Community. https://www.theintegrativemotherexperience.com

When you become part of my private community, this is where you will be invited to all my special experiences. My next Guided Experience starts after Labor Day when the kids go back to school.  

"It's always time to Choose Joy & Fulfillment," (just for Mamas like you that own a business/work in a service industry)

-Leave a review- it helps other Mamas find me

-Follow me on Instagram @timewithsarahswift

https://theintegrativemotherexperience.com

Transcript

Sarah Swift 0:15

Welcome to the Integrative Mother Experience Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Swift, wife of 28 years and mother of three teenagers. I want to have conversations about why so many mamas wearing multiple hats, working and serving others, or owning a business, especially in the beauty industry, feel like they don't have enough time and that they need to choose between their work and their family. We'll also uncover causes of overwhelm, lack of wellbeing, and joy. I am here with over three decades of experience working in the beauty industry, owning several types of businesses starting in my early 20s, and sharing stories along with solutions to help other mothers avoid the feeling of always missing out. Time is an asset that we can't get back. I can't wait to dive into these deep conversations. I hope you will join me. Welcome back, beautiful mamas. This is part two of our transformation five-part series. Today, we are talking about joy. I've talked a bit about this subject before, but I am going to go a a little bit of a different direction today. So let's dive in. So the way that today I'm talking about joy is joy as my lens, not my reward. So what does that mean? For me, it means I'm not waiting to experience joy until dot, dot, dot. Until I've worked so many hours. Until I've accomplished so many tasks. Until I've done fill in the dots. Whatever it is that you think that makes you able to receive joy because it's a reward. That is not how I see joy anymore. I see joy as my lens. I see joy as something I can experience daily as often as I want to. Because at this point, I'm accepting the fact that God gives us joy in so many little ways every single day, and it's a choice. It's a choice to see them and receive it. And when we think about the word happiness, which isn't exactly the same as joy, that's another thing that people think that it's an emotion that you feel, but really, happiness is a choice. And if you consider happiness a choice and you accept joy in as something that you can experience every single day, I think you'll really notice that your transformation will begin today. So let's do this. Let's go in and let's break this down. So when we say that joy is my baseline, so I want to respect myself enough to be aligned, and that means I can be direct with people around me, which sets the example and it allows them the opportunity to be direct and honest with me. And I see that as a gift. For so long, I was afraid to do this, and I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't interrupting anyone else's flow, so to speak. And that, I believe, is part of my nature, but also part of conditioning of people pleasing. And now that I see it as if joy is my baseline and I'm allowing myself to do this, I'm also setting the bar for everybody around me, including my children as a mother, that you can experience joy. You don't have to worry about what everybody else around you is feeling or not feeling. You are allowed to have your emotions and feel them, and we don't have to shove them down and suppress them. That isn't something that I look at as honorable, and I think that that was really a standard of the past, and maybe it still is for some people. It's just not a baseline for me. The kindest thing that you can do is honoring yourself, and I just think in so many ways there's so many examples of this. So I think that when we choose a cheerful heart, this is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. Proverbs 17:22. Not always looking in the past or the future is honoring your desires. You have desires for a reason. This is something that you don't have to feel is a negative thing or something that you need to ignore just because your desires may be different than family members or people that you work with or your friends. God puts different desires on different people's hearts, and this is a good thing. And honoring them can allow you to transform into the person that you are meant to be, to do the things that you are meant to do, your purpose, your design. So if you don't take the time to slow down, and you're always in a hurry, and you're always busy, busy doing, you're not going to hear those whispers. I was at a wedding this weekend, and boy, talk about joy. This was one of the best wedding experiences I have ever had. There were so many tears in all of the speeches, and the majority came from men, which was so joyful for me because they were paving a path for the rest of the men in the room and showing the women in the room that they could be vulnerable and that they could feel their feelings. Wow, what a difference. I mean, the things that were said in these speeches, first of all, were so heartfelt, and we all felt it. But to allow the tears to fall and to choke up while they were speaking, I just love that. And you could feel the energy in the room of this wedding. There was so many little touches of God's presence, too, right from the moment when you walked in. They literally had a Bible that had customization on it on the cover for the couple, highlighter pens so you could highlight your favorite verse, and then a pen so you could sign your name next to it. The cookies that were branded with their names and the date were in the sign of a cross, and there was one at each of the table settings for us and additional ones on a table to take. I mean, my goodness, this wedding had so many touches of joy, and it was felt by everyone. And I think that when we're trying to always follow the path of what's trending or what other people are doing around us, whether that's our family or just people that, are in our age group, we're missing out on our own individual path of joy. And when we actually embrace it, we're allowing others to see that, and then they can embrace their own uniqueness, and they can be authentic to themselves. And that brings variety, and that's a good thing. Having contrast in the world so not everything is the same really brings to light the differences. Another thing that I just want to talk about too is just allowing the emotions to flow. So whatever the emotions is that we're feeling, in this case, of course, we're talking about joy. But in order to really feel joy, we have to be able to allow our emotions to flow, period. So that means that if we're pushing our emotions down, we're avoiding them because they're uncomfortable, or we've been taught that it's not proper to show your emotions. What ends up happening is that flow inside our body isn't able to actually feel it, and it's going to get stuck. It's going to get stuck somewhere physically in your body. So of course, we don't want to overreact, and there is a way to properly have your emotions, be felt, and it doesn't have to be in front of other people or directed towards other people. But what I'm saying is not to let it back up, so not to let it get to a point where it cannot flow properly. So whatever that feeling is when you're letting it out, and that hopefully isn't directed at somebody if it's an angry emotion, you're allowing everything else to flow, including joy. So when we're paving a new path, we're allowing others to choose so that they know that this is a choice as well. You don't have to surrender your power and your freedom to make others comfortable. It also doesn't mean that you have to be cruel or indifferent to others. It just means that you're honoring your own, and that means that you can let that joy flow throughout the day and throughout the different experiences that you have. So I know that in human nature, safety is a big thing, and a lot of times our brain will tell us it's not safe to try new things, and it's not safe to maybe say things that we're feeling. But if we're always holding things in, then I don't know how we're going to experience new things in a new way that's aligned to ourselves. And when people are, unaligned and they're living in survival patterns They show you with reactivity because they're avoiding responding timely or maybe even at all. And what I'm challenging you to do is to allow the flow, not block it. And with this allowed flow, the joy will come through and your lens will be different. You're seeing things in a different light. And here's another thing that I just want to say, Matthew chapter 9 verse 17, "You can't put wine in old wineskins." So when I think about this, sometimes that means that you have to pave a new path. There, there may need to be a new way and sometimes it feels like you're abandoning your family or your friends. When you think about the movie Moana and how she's going beyond the island, beyond the reef, and they're scared for her and they're saying it's not safe. Sometimes that does happen where people are well-meaning because they truly just can't see another way and sometimes it's more of the narrative of how dare you? This is what we do. This is what we've always done. And either way, you're not honoring what God has put on your heart and the purpose that he has for you. So today's episode regarding joy as your lens is about slowing down, about carving out that time for stillness, quality time, time where you're not hearing all the noise, you're not hearing all of the shoulds and the opinions. You're sitting in stillness, and this is where we can hear what God wants to say to us. This is where we can hear our soul quietly talking to us. And without this, it's really hard to discern what's yours and what's the projection of everybody else around you, and maybe even this pressure that you may have to continue a pattern of those that came before you, disappoint others, although you know that your purpose and your desires are different. It's hard to get to that point for some people where they can acknowledge that even though they respect the people around them and they're grateful for all the opportunities and they very much love, the loved ones in their lives, they do have a different path, and they're called to it, and they want to follow it. And I think that is such a beautiful thing. That's where the joy is going to live when you explore that, and you're not going to know if you don't pause enough to discern, what am I being called to do? What are my desires? And actually test some things out. See what feels good. I know for me, I didn't feel good to be rushing around all the time, to always be doing. I wanted to have deeper impact, and I had that desire. I wanted to experience more things with my children. That's the type of mom I wanted to be because I wanted to experience things with them. I wanted the conversations in the car with them. And yes, we do carpool. We have carpooled, and not everybody wants to do the taxi mom, but it doesn't make my desire wrong. It just means that's something that was inside of me, and I really enjoy it, and I don't want to miss family dinners. And I did for a really, really long time, and now it's just something that I cherish so deeply because I always had that desire there, and it's so joyful. And I'm choosing joy as my lens, which means my choices are different than they used to be, and this is bringing me the joy that was always there in escrow for me to have. I just had to make different choices, and that came after I was able to slow down and sit in the stillness and really evaluate what it was that my soul wanted. Not what anybody else wanted for me or what everybody else was doing around me. What did I want for myself? What was I being called to do? And this is what I challenge you to do. And this is where we can really get these downloads on what it is that we're being called to do and where the joy lives. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please, if you know of a friend that would benefit from it, share it with a friend. And you can follow me on Instagram at TimewithSarahSwift. I also have resources on my website, and you can sign up to receive my emails through my private mom group community. That is at theintegrativemotherexperience.com. And I also do have an exciting workshop coming up very soon. So if you get into my private moms community, you will be the first to know about the details on that. Thank you so much, and have a blessed day.