How Living in Stable Misery With Your Family Can Impact Your Business
Welcome to episode 60 of The Determined Mom Show. I am here with a very special guest, Dr. Lynyetta Willis. She is a psychologist and a family empowerment coach for smart, successful women and their families. Today, she will be talking to us about how living in stable misery with your family can impact your business.
You recently participated in the Business Bomb Summit and delivered an amazing presentation; I loved everything, including the Venn diagram. I’m super nerdy like that, so I loved it, and we will expand on that today. First, I want to ask you how you started working from home and that thing. Like what was that process like and that journey for you? A psychologist by training, even though I do family coaching now and after I got my Ph.D., I entered into private.
And I did that for several years. And when my daughter was born, I had a son and a daughter. I was in private practice with my son, and we moved when my daughter was born. So I shut down my practice and kept saying, I’m going to start it up again. I’m going to start it up again. And then when my daughter hit like five, I was like, maybe I don’t want to start this up again, because I keep, I’ve been saying this for like five years now.
I started to look for other ways to use my skills and share things that I. And I found the realm of coaching, so now I have decided that I love, love, love working with families and couples and parents and coaching them to break free from stable misery so they can have more joy and harmony with families.
People that come to me usually see it like in their parenting or in their partnerships where things are going along, but so they’re pretty stable, they’re familiar, they’re relatively safe, but they’re people are feeling unfulfilled. Unhappy, frustrated, consistently, right? And they’re finding themselves in these situations where they’re repeating the same cycles or the same patterns repeatedly, that just aren’t helpful and aren’t feeding them, and aren’t feeding their family.
And a lot of times, it happens. In marriages or partnerships, we see ourselves kind of engineering that may be going from soulmate to roommate or repeating those, finding ourselves in those same fights repeatedly and again, and not sure how to break free. And even in our parenting, you know, our kids are consistent.
They usually do the same things repeatedly, but we find ourselves stuck in that rut. And we were just wondering how to get out, unsure how to shift the dynamic that frustrates us.
I’m in and out of it stage. But you know, every single mother, business owner, whatever, goes through this often. It’s a really common thing, especially in general. It’s a very common thing. As business owners, especially those of us, who enjoy our businesses, and if we’re entrepreneurs, we usually enjoy some aspects.
Cause a lot of us are doing it by choice. But what I notice can end up happening is that we end up using our business as what I like to call a mistress. Right. And we use it as an escape route. We don’t have to deal with the stable misery we’re feeling. So there is this interconnectedness between our business and our families when we’re in stable misery, and they can affect each other.
You find yourself in this space where it starts with stable misery in your family, and then it moves into this business mistress phase where you find yourself retreating to your businesses. For a quick pick me up, we might get into that fight with our partner, or our kid might do that thing again.
And to soothe ourselves, we. I’ll be sure to check my subscriber list. Did anybody else subscribe or let me do another freebie? Or let me check my email for the fifth time in the past 10 minutes. And we find ourselves using it as an escape route constantly over and over and over again.
So then our business becomes that thing we go to for soothing and support in satisfaction, right? And it often, I say it as a mistress, our business. Usually, about three different needs that we have. And the first need is our need for control. Like we have this need to feel controlled.
And when we’re in stable misery, we often feel out of control completely. Like we try to fix it. We try to do things differently. And it’s just not happening. But we can control our businesses, you know, pretty well. Sometimes the outcome gets the clients we want, but we can control how we engage it and what we do.
Our business doesn’t talk back, doesn’t fight with us, doesn’t tell us we’re wrong, right? This leads to the next thing where which is competence. When we’re in stable misery, we often feel so incompetent. Like I had a client once tell. I can run a Fortune 500 company but can’t get my kid to listen or make my marriage work.
And then I talked to her yesterday, and I didn’t realize that’s what you were doing. And then it was just funny because I felt so incompetent at burning their work in on time and getting it to the right place. And I was just so frustrated with it. But then, you know, I just had hosted and pulled off this summit for hundreds of women, and it’s just such a contrast.
And the longer we can sit in that space and not retreat to picking up our phone or, if your phone’s on the charger right and it’s not right by you, you’re less likely to fall into that subconscious space like there are times. Full disclosure. I have picked up my phone, opened it up, turned it on, and then sat there and been like; There’s nothing I need to do on this phone right now.
Like, what’s coming up for you? Around that time, that makes you more likely to retreat to it. And this is important because, going back to the Frey piece, another thing that can happen in that stage is your family can resent your business that happens.
And we feel out of control, feeling a sense of powerlessness. I can’t do anything like my client, who can run a Fortune 500 company but can’t get our kids to listen or fix her marriage. Like, that’s hard that talk about a fall from Grace. That’s a huge gap there.
It’s like the opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s, yeah, it is. And it can also bring up feelings of imposter syndrome, you know, and all kinds of stuff that don’t feel very good to us. So when we get, when we use self-empowerment, it’s really about asking in that moment, what is one thing I can do at this moment right now to move me one step closer to.
Which is the opposite of stable misery, by the way, dynamic joy. Like what’s one thing I can do to bring me closer to joy? What’s one thing I can do to help me feel more empowered in this? And it might be anything from voicing your truth to eating a cracker. I mean,
Just pick one thing for someone else. It might be, oh, well, I noticed my body sensations are my emotions first. What body sensations or emotions convince you that you may be descending into that statement? What key emotion or body sensation for you lets you know we’re heading into that cycle again?
You’re aware of it now; could you do something about it? You could always do something about it. That’s why I like calling it dynamic joy, the antidote to stable misery, because it’s not something you either are or aren’t. It’s, you know, dynamic. It’s, it’s moving, it’s fluid, right?
And you were smelling it. That might be as joyful as you can be in the moment. And that’s fine. But five minutes from now, you know, it might be laughing hysterically with your kid, you know, or dancing with your partner to some silly music and then making your kids roll their eyes at you in the process. I mean, different things will bring us joy at different times.
And so that’s why that self-empowerment step is so helpful. It’s just about what can bring me one step closer to joy. I’m not feeling it. I’m unhappy. I need to be fulfilled. What’s one thing that I can do to get one step closer there? You have given us many tools in this short conversation for mastering this.
I think it’s amazing. Yay. I’m so glad, you know, and I find that it’s helpful to know, like, what are things that I can do because as a therapist, there were a lot of things that I would help clients to do, like in term like long, as I said, I worked with a lot of trauma survivors and so things would take time.
Screws, where like they didn’t, we didn’t even ask them to do it. They vacuumed. Could you fix the couch? What? Rolled the blanket and picked up all the toys. It was crazy. That is amazing. And I love that you recognized it as often with many of my clients; one of the goals I put out there for them is to have at least one dance party a week.
At least because we are, especially as entrepreneurs, because we’re so driven, we tend to hit wins and then roll right past them. It’s like a huge thing that we might have worked towards for months, and then we hit it and checked it like a to-do list item. Remember to put a new toilet paper roll in the bathroom.
In this moment of pride, I’m proud of myself. And so giving ourselves the honor of pausing and saying that is so helpful. I know, as moms, we don’t do that. No, never. Not at all. Not at all. Like I have to use my often, take my own medicine, you know? Like, wait, no, I can’t just run past that.
If I have that thought, my feelings and actions will go in a completely different direction. I am changing one, just one of those—same thing with textures. If I can find something to be, if I’m agitated, overwhelmed, or frustrated, I can find one thing to be grateful for or move me closer to.
That’s automatically going to change my body sensations. It’s automatically going to change my actions, and it’s automatically going to redirect my thoughts. So they’re all connected. It doesn’t matter where you start, start somewhere and start with intention. And you’re going to shift things in a way that pulls your family out of stable misery.
So your business doesn’t have to be your go-to, so you can enjoy the people you’re around. Instead of resenting them. Whatever the opposite of enjoying them. Avoiding, resenting, numbing out, thinking you’re poison. There’s a whole list of things there.
These are efficient tips that you can use at this moment. So please grab that; from there, you can also contact me. Awesome. Thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your wisdom and expertise. Thank you for having me, Amanda.