Ep #42: Choose Your Mood

episode summary

We can have many different interactions in a day, with many different people, who can be in many different moods. The one constant? Your mood. Your mood doesn't have to be impacted by a snooty barista, cranky coworker, or stressed-out spouse. You can protect your mood with the power of the bubble.

The bubble isn't about being in a great mood all the time, no matter what - it's about creating a space where your mood is undisturbed by the outside world's moods. It can make a huge impact on your life - give it a try!

For the full show notes and transcript, head over here.

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CHAPTERS:

2:38 - Don't Catch Feelings

4:30 - The Bubble

9:18 - Parenting in the Bubble

11:50 - Feel However You Need to Feel

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• CLICK TO READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

  Hey, I'm Michelle Gauthier, and you're listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. Hello friends, thanks for joining today. Today we're going to be talking about how to protect your own mood and your own energy. This is really important because every day, we're running into other humans and sometimes the way that they're feeling leaks over onto us. We catch feelings from other people even when we don't necessarily mean to or want to. So I'm going to give you some examples of how and when that can happen and then give you some tips for how to not absorb other people's energy, to stay in your own lane, feel how you want to feel. And this is really important because if you think about, on a day to day basis, all the people that you interact with. So you wake up and if you live with other people, you interact with their energy. And then you go to work, or even if you're just on conference calls or talking to people on the phone, you are absorbing the energy of the people who you're interacting with there. If you stop at the store on the way home, there's the people you run into there. So if you outsource your mood, meaning you just accept the mood that other people are in, that is not going to serve you. So I want to teach you how to create your own mood and stay in your own mood at your own free will. First, though, I want to remind you of a couple things going on right now. If you are starting out this new year and feeling a little bit lost or let's say you came to my Your Best Year course, the 2024 course, and you made a great list of goals, but you're feeling a little iffy about actually getting them implemented, now is a perfect time to work with me one on one. I honestly don't have a ton of spots open right now. I have like two at the moment. So if you're thinking about doing it, set up a time with me. I would absolutely love to talk to you. The link is in the show notes. If you start working with me now, you'll feel all squared away by summertime. Summertime feels so far away right now, but it'll be here before we know it. It feels so far away right now because, at least where I live in the Midwest, in St. Louis, it's so, so cold, but it will be here before we know it, and just think you could be feeling awesome by then, calm and not overwhelmed, and well on your way to meeting your goals for the year. Okay, speaking of freezing cold, it's been so freezing cold here and I don't know where you're listening but I haven't seen a place in the United States that isn't experiencing colder than usual temperatures. Well, maybe California, but other than that, it seems like every place is having cold temperatures. But we had this major freeze last week and I had scheduled a trip to go on a quick getaway weekend to Florida with the handsome man friend and it happened to be - we booked it ages ago - but it happened to be right in the middle of this blizzard that was going across the Midwest. It was not hitting my city, but it was hitting many cities in the Midwest, which caused, you know, lots of issues for all the planes and airlines, et cetera. So my flight got canceled. I actually love when this happens, when your flight gets canceled, but they tell you the day before. That's the best when you don't have to go to the airport. So I knew it was canceled. Then I had to decide should I book another ticket on a different airline and just give it a try, or should I just call it? I think I would have just called it if the handsome man friend wasn't already in Florida and I hadn't paid in full for the place where we were going to stay for the weekend. So I decided to go for it. Glad I did. It was great. It was pretty easy getting down there. But on the way back home, first of all, it was a beautiful day in Florida when we were leaving, so everyone in the airport who was trying to fly somewhere was probably going somewhere colder. Our flight was delayed and then delayed and delayed and delayed and just the kind where you start thinking, "are we ever going to get home?" And as you sit there for a long time you know if you're sitting at the gate and you're going on just a regular flight, that's on time. You might chat with like a person or two, but by the time you've been sitting there for a couple hours and, like sharing phone chargers and those kinds of things, everyone starts talking to each other. So I listened to lots of stories of like I've been in the airport for 12 hours and there's no way we're getting out of here tonight. And I saw that these parents with a wild toddler or any toddlers not wild, I don't know - but she was just overtired and running around like crazy. She kept tripping and falling and I started feeling stressed for them about how they were going to manage that. And then, all of a sudden, I came to my senses and I realized, oh my gosh, I am just absorbing the energy of this airport. Plus, it was hot in there. Something about being hot always makes me feel less patient and more prone to being angry. So I came to my senses and I decided okay, this calls for my little trick called The Bubble. So all you do for this is to imagine yourself in a bubble where no one else's mood or feelings can get in. They just bounce against your bubble and just go back out into the atmosphere. Other people can have whatever mood they want. There's no part of this where you're trying to influence someone else to be more calm or less upset about something. It's not that, it's not about them at all, it's all about you. So in order to do this, I had to, of course, realize that I was absorbing everybody else's energy. And I got up and I just had to take a little walk, a little change of scenery walk, so that I could just get in the bubble. You might not always have this option, but if you do, it's a nice way to restart your own mood. Just change your scenery, even if it's just for a minute. So if you're sitting at your desk and you're feeling really annoyed, just get up and walk to the bathroom or go get a drink of water or something. Change it up just a little bit. Okay, so I went for a little walk. I visualized myself getting into a protective bubble where only my feelings would exist. You can just picture yourself stepping into it. You can talk to people outside of the bubble. So once I got in the bubble, I went back and I was still talking to those same people I was talking to before I left. But then you can hear their story and listen to them complain or be upset from a neutral place without getting annoyed yourself. You've more moved into the role of being an observer than a participant. When you're in the bubble, you're observing other people's moods and you're staying in your own mood. Some of the helpful things you can tell yourself in a moment like that are: I'm choosing to stay in my own energy. I can see other people's energy, but I'm choosing not to engage or absorb it. So if you just take a second to think about your own life, where are the places or who are the people where you feel like you're absorbing someone else's energy? I feel like most families have somebody who kind of sets the tone or sets the mood in their family, so those people sometimes will influence our mood. If I think about work over time and all of the people who I've worked with over time, there are two particular people throughout my whole career that stick out in my mind as people whose energy I would absorb easily, and often. I wish I had known about the bubble then. When kids are in that sort of unreasonable stage where they get so upset or they have a big fit, it's really hard sometimes not to do that. I think I might have shared this on the podcast before, but when my daughter was little, she was, and still is, a person who is very independent and likes to do things herself. So every time we'd get in the car and she needed to buckle her own car seat which took what felt like 700 years, and then I would sometimes be in a rush, so I would just say I'm just going to buckle it this time, you can do it next time or whatever and I'd buckle it, she'd just look me right in the eye and push the button to unbuckle her seatbelt and tell me, "I do it". And then I would stand there just fuming while she buckled her seatbelt. Or the other alternative, which I'm sure every parent out there has done, where you shove their hips down into the seat and you're sweating and forcing them in. But considering she would just unbuckle it anyway, I decided just to sit there and wait. But while I sat there and waited I was furious. And then when I got in the car and started driving, I was also furious. So I absorbed her energy, hook line and sinker. So if I wanted to use the bubble in that situation - I wish I had known that; that would have been really - I would have just physically taken a step back from the back seat door and reminded myself I'm choosing to stay in my own energy. I would imagine myself stepping into that bubble and then I would just stand there and watch her buckle her car seat because really, is there ever a hurry so big that you can't wait one minute? I don't think there actually is, unless that's a true emergency, in which case I probably wouldn't even mess with the seatbelt. If our house was on fire, something I would just throw everybody in or run next door. But it sure feels like when you're super mad that it's an emergency and I can't sit here and wait for her to do this. The reason why I really felt like that was because I was mad. If I was coming from a calm place, I could have rationalized and been like, alright, this isn't that big of a deal, alright. So I'm predicting ahead of time a couple questions you might have about this idea. One is how can this work with my child when I need to discipline them? A lot of times, parents who I work with will say to me well, if I don't yell or if I don't engage with them at their level, I don't feel like I'm doing my job as a parent. So, in my opinion, when you're in the bubble, you actually do a better job as a parent. That toddler example I just gave you was one; I can think of an example (many examples) with older kids where you know when everything you do is just embarrassing and mortifying and you're the worst mom in the whole world and they can't understand why you won't let them do something. You can see their energy and their annoyedness and you can stay in your calmness and something that I do, when I step into that bubble of calm with my teenagers, is to say, "I can see that you're upset, I'm not upset and I'm not going to change my mind." And then I just leave it at that, and sometimes I even just walk away. So, even if it feels like you need to engage with your child or your spouse at the same level, at the same feeling that they are, I actually think the opposite makes for much better communication and, more importantly, you're not upset at the end. Okay, so what should I do if I find myself absorbing someone else's mood? So an example that I'm thinking of here is that I used to sit next to someone at work when I physically went to work - it's been a long time since I did that - but when I physically went to work, I used to sit next to someone who was extremely negative, and every day this person would come in and you know, talk about how hard things had been that morning, how much there was to do, how we were never going to get it all done, how they didn't have time to go to lunch, etc. And so those thoughts started entering my mind as well, and I realized that my first thought was I can't sit by her anymore. I need to move physical spaces so I don't have to sit by her anymore. That's how I felt, like I needed to deal with it then. Now, by the way, that was not an option, so I couldn't actually do that. Now I would just say, okay, I'm going to pretend that there's a bubble just sitting around my chair and every day when I walk into work, I step inside my bubble. I can hear her, I can say, oh, that sounds like a rough morning, and then I'm going to move back into my energy of possibility and calmness and productivity. Okay. Another question I get about this is what if I'm just in a bad mood or I'm sad or I'm, you know, going through something really hard, then what? The bubble still works, because in that case I you know, I'm very pro feeling whatever feeling you need to feel. So if you're going through a hard time and you feel sad and you just want to feel sad, and someone else is outside the bubble trying to be like cheer up, everything's fine, you're going to be okay, but you're not feeling it, maybe that works. Maybe you choose to absorb their energy. Sometimes someone else's good energy can help you if you're feeling stuck or sad, but if you just really truly need to stick with your sadness for that moment, you can do the exact same thing. Say everyone else's energy outside of my bubble seems to be cheerier than mine today. I'm going to go ahead and stay in this, whatever your energy is. Maybe it's sad. I'm going to go ahead and stay in this for today and we'll see about it again in an hour or tomorrow or whatever. So this isn't just a 'you always have to be in a good mood' type of thing. This is a 'I get to decide what my mood is', just like other people get to decide what their mood is. Okay, that's it, friends. Hope you're listening to this and thinking about when you're going to be climbing into your bubble next. It's a very helpful tool and I'd love to hear how it works for you. See you next week. Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast. If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier,com. See you next week.

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