Episode 152 – Be an Agent in Your Family
Family relationships run on systems, and each family has its own system. One system many families use is to blame each other for how we act and react, and not take ownership of our own choices. My husband and I were stuck in this blame/blame system for years. And then we decided we wanted something more and we wanted to clean up our relationship so that we could move forward into a new type of system. When one person changes their input into the system, the entire system is forced into change.
When you take responsibility for yourself, you find more freedom. Being an agent in your own life is a simple concept, but not an easy one. Listen to this episode to see how you can begin to take responsibility for yourself and become an agent in your family.
Get some help from Tina
If you are feeling stuck, not sure how what you’re hearing on this podcast can work in your life and aren’t quite sure how to create that future vision for yourself, let’s talk. I offer a handful of free calls each month and they are snatched up quickly. Set up your free call today so you can feel better about what the future holds for you.
CLICK HERE TO SET UP YOUR FREE CALL
Full Transcript
00:05
Are your family relationships feeling disconnected, maybe contentious? If you’re ready to begin repairing relationships and connect on a whole new level so that you can feel more peace and love in your family, then come with me. I’m going to show you how. I’m Tina Gosney, a certified life and advanced relationship coach, and I’m so glad you’re here now. Let’s get started.
00:36
Hey, welcome to the podcast today. I’m Tina Gosney, your advanced relationship coach, I coach on family relationships. We’re going to talk about something today that is quite simple to talk about and quite difficult to implement, and that is being an agent in your own life, being an agent in your relationships, and taking responsibility for what you do in your relationships, in your family. So this is something that’s simple concept. It’s very simple. It’s not complicated. We get to choose. We understand that, but we don’t understand is how often we give up that choice, and we become a victim. And so when we try to implement this, if it gets it’s not easy. It kind of gets tricky and difficult sometimes, but it’s still simple. The idea is simple.
01:35
Think about what an agent is. An agent is someone who acts and is not acted upon. A victim is someone who has acted upon and does not have the ability to choose for themselves. An agent is the opposite of that. An agent takes responsibility for their choices. They don’t turn around and blame them on another person, even when that would be easy to do.
02:01
An agent doesn’t see things in all or nothing as in that person is bad, so I’m good. An agent sees, oh, I had some responsibility in how that situation happened, or this situation is happening. I contributed to it. An agent takes their own responsibility. An agent sees how their thought patterns play into how they show up in their life and in their relationships. They decide for themselves how they will act no matter what the situation is.
02:41
Now I say this, and it sounds like a simple concept. It sounds like, of course, I take responsibility for myself. I’m going to tell you that you don’t, at least not 100% of the time, because nobody does. But the more that we’re aware of this, the more we can start working on it. We can’t work on something. We can’t change something until we’re aware that it’s even happening in the first place.
03:09
And when we start to really move into our own agency and try to grab a hold of it and take responsibility for ourselves, we are going to go against our brains, natural tendencies, our brains natural programming, which is to blame another person. I did this because you did that. It’s our brain that wants to be right all the time. Just another thing that our brain wants to do. It tells us that we are right. It sees a situation, it interprets it one way, and it says this is the only way to interpret that situation, and you are right. Well, everybody else’s brain is doing the same thing, and nobody interprets things the same way. So we can’t all be right, but we all are partially right, and we’re all partially wrong.
04:01
Our brain tries to control a situation. It wants to be in control. It wants to have certainty. It wants to not have anxiety and have any outstanding fears about anything. It wants to just know and be solid and not have any ambiguity. Well, we don’t always get to control situations, so that another is another thing that’s just hard to get a hold of, to let go, and our brain wants to be defensive, because we need to be right, because we want to be in control, because we find the need to blame somebody else and not look at our own contribution. Our brain gets defensive, and our body also contributes to that.
04:48
Getting defensive, we get our fight, flight, fun, freeze response, our nervous system response comes in when we feel like someone’s coming at us and telling us that something that we don’t want to hear, we get very defensive. And when that happens, when our nervous system is kicked in and our fight, flight, freeze, fawn response comes on, we are seeing anything but our agency. We’re seeing anything but our own responsibility.
05:22
My husband, I’ve been married for a long time, a few decades. It’s been a long time. We just had another anniversary, and we spent a lot of years really, really busy, just in the busyness of life with raising kids and trying to build careers and trying to pay the bills and all the pressures that go along with raising a family.
05:46
We spent a lot of years sweeping things under the rug times that we got into disagreements or situations where we were hurt by the other one, and we didn’t know how to communicate that to each other, And so we didn’t we just kind of let it kind of fizzle out until it wasn’t a problem, an immediate problem anymore, and then we metaphorically swept that problem under the rug, and it would stay there until the next problem popped up. And then it seems like that problem was underlying the current one that we were dealing with. And then the same thing happened. We would maybe deal with it a little bit, but not mostly, and we would also sweep that one under the rug.
06:32
Well, years and years went by, and pretty soon we had such a big pile under the rug that it was hard to have a conversation or do anything together at all without that tripping over that big, giant pile that we had never cleaned up. And we decided, okay, we’ve got some time now. We’re not so busy anymore. We have time to work things through and to put the attention that it was going to take to really work on our relationship and clean up the stories that we had in our own brains about the other one.
07:14
We wanted to have a better relationship, and we knew that in order to do that, we were going to have to clean up all this stuff under the rug, and so just a little bit play, a little bit, we would pull back that rug. We would take a little thing out. We take a situation out, and we would work through it. We did that over a period of a few years.
07:40
We would read books together that would spark a conversation. We would read something, and then something would spark a conversation about a past event, something in the past, that we had gone through. And we would say, hey, let’s talk about that. And sometimes we would work through it inone night.
07:58
Sometimes it took night after night after night after night of going through the same situation, to feel like we had some resolution there, and that we were understanding each other, and that we had come to a place of forgiveness and understanding and compassion. We read books. We read a lot of books. We took some online courses together. We did some coaching, but most of all, those things taught us tools. Those things taught us how to look at ourselves and take responsibility for ourselves, and they sparked a foundation for conversations, very, very difficult conversations.
08:43
But those conversations were also they were just difficult. They were vitally important to us. And you know what happens when you have just like you have this closet, you’ve been stuffing things in for years, and you get to the point where you can’t even open the closet anymore without things falling out. I mean, this is just another metaphor, but it’s the same thing as sweeping things under the rug.
09:04
But we really dumped out everything out of that closet. And when you have everything dumped out on the floor, and you’re you can get overwhelmed. You look at all this stuff on the floor and you’re like, I don’t know how to put this back together again. And definitely, we went through some things like that, but one by one, we had to decide, what am I going to put back into this closet? What do I want to keep? What are some things that are really beneficial to our relationship, to ourself, to our life, that we need to keep? What are some things that they’re just garbage? They they don’t serve us. They are stories that we made up about each other that we were completely wrong. They just need to go to the garbage can, and we just need to leave them there.
09:52
And then there were things that we had been carrying for each other that was not ours to carry. He had taken some things that were my responsbility. And I had taken some things that were his responsibility, and we had to give those back to each other. We did that by reading books, taking online courses, a lot of coaching, coaching, I think, was the thing that really was the linchpin to help us have those conversations.
10:18
So giving you just a little bit of background into a conversation that we had. I think this was maybe about a month ago or so. We were eating dinner, and it’s just the two of us now. So we can have open conversations, which is kind of nice to not have younger ears listening to us, and we can just be completely honest and and open about talking about things, but we got into a conversation during dinner where we started to fall back into old patterns.
10:49
It was, well, if you hadn’t have done that, then I wouldn’t have done this. And then on the other side, it was, well, you did that. And so that’s why I did this. And there was some back and forth, and this was really pretty lighthearted. We were not arguing, but we also I could feel some tension. I could feel some there’s a there’s a tension when you’re having a conversation and you want to be right, and it all feels like a tug of war. It feels like you’re each tugging on your side, and then the other person tugs on their side, and you’re both kind of going against each other. That’s what this conversation felt like.
11:27
And I just remember finishing dinner and the rest of that night, I just felt unsettled, and it was bothering me, and I was trying to figure out, why did that conversation bother me? Because sometimes you know you’re in the middle of something and you don’t see it right away, but then, you know, I got a few hours of perspective about it, and got to have some perspective on that conversation, and I saw, Oh, wow, we’re falling back into the old pattern. We’re blaming each other, we’re not taking responsibility. We’re not being agents in our lives.
12:00
So the next day, we got up and I said, Hey, you know that conversation we had last night, I am sorry you never made me do anything. All of that was my choice. I own every choice that I made. I’m not going to put that on you, because it’s not your responsibility. And I said, I’m really trying when I see that I’ve been blaming something on somebody, I am really trying to be responsible for myself, because I don’t want anyone else to control my actions, and I don’t want to blame my actions on anybody else.
12:37
And he thanked me, and then did the same thing, and he took responsibility for his part in that whole situation that we’ve been talking about.
12:46
So I get to choose who I want to be, and who we are being is much more indicative of who we are than what the actions that you see yourself doing. We will do things, but they are just indicative of who we are down inside – the person that we have become. Our actions will always show who we are. They always give it away and who you are, who you’re working to become. Those thoughts generate feelings, which generate actions, and you end up giving yourself away and your level of development all day long, with the way that you’re thinking, the way that you’re feeling and what you are doing.
13:30
And this is the way that we speak ourselves into existence, the language that we use when we talk about ourselves, when we talk about our relationships. Those become who we are. The way that you think about yourself, the way that you talk to yourself and about yourself, will create the person that you are. Full stop.
13:54
There is no oh, this is just the way that I am. Because you create the way that you are that is not something that you fall into and don’t have control over the way you are is created each day by what you choose to focus on and what identity you have chosen to pick up and live. So have you chosen to pick up the identity of an agent in your own life, or have you chosen to pick up the identity of a victim in your own life. I don’t think any of us live 100% on one side or 100% on the other. I think we all have a combination. But what is your combination?
14:34
The way that you speak to and about yourself will be the person that you create. You end up telling yourself who you are, so that next morning, when I got up and I did not like the way I had acted the night before, and I said, Hey, my responsibility, not yours, that was me speaking myself into being an agent, speaking myself into the person that I want to be, taking responsibility for myself, because we are not just automatically a certain way
15:10
You will speak, feel, and then live, who you believe that you are, and all of that is a choice.
15:20
So I don’t know if I’ve ever talked in this language about speaking yourself into existence before on the podcast. So if you’re wondering, like I don’t know what that means, don’t worry. I’ll give you some ideas. This is just some of the ways that we could speak ourselves into being an agent in our own life. This is a place to start saying things like this to yourself.
15:44
No one makes me do anything. I am the one who chooses.
15:48
I choose the way I think about myself and others.
15:52
I always have a choice. No matter what,
15:55
I can always choose to change the way I’ve learned to survive in this world, in my old patterns.
16:02
I can always choose my response.
16:05
I’m a kind person, and I treat myself and others with kindness.
16:10
It’s not easy to choose to change my patterns, but it gets easier every time I make a new choice.
16:16
I can be different in how I respond, and I’m committed to figuring out how to do that, even if I need to seek help from someone else,
16:25
My responses are my choice.
16:29
It’s my job to look at myself and see how I contributed to the situation.
16:34
I am who I want to be, not who everyone else has told me that I am.
16:40
Those are just some things. If you want to borrow one of those or a few of those sentences to speak yourself into being an agent, then, then they’re right there for you to go back into review.
16:53
You know, this goes against our brain, like I said before we it goes against our need to be right, against our need to have control in a situation, against our defensiveness that we get when someone calls us out on something. And so when we are trying to speak ourself into a new way of being, it can be very disorienting, because we’re so used to being an old way, but we keep creating that old way every time we speak about ourselves that way.
17:23
So when we are speaking ourselves into being a different way, it can be very disorienting, and sometimes it takes a lot of thought process to do that. We start questioning ourselves before we do or say anything. And we kind of go through this process in our brain of saying, is this right? I’m not sure if this is the right thing to do, or if I should say this, or if I should say that, or if I just keep my mouth shut.
17:50
And it’s really easy to get stuck inside of our own brains and then not do anything, because we get stuck in the indecision of, I don’t even know what to do right now, but it’s really important to move forward and just to try some things out, because if we don’t move forward, we’re just going to get stuck in our own brain, in the overthinking. And that gets exhausting. It really does. It’s so easy to get caught there and to think, I don’t know what the right thing is, to say is, and I have to say the right thing, well, what if you just show up and with kindness to yourself and kindness to the other person, you just try some things out and you take responsibility for yourself, only you know what that looks like in your life and in your relationships.
18:36
So don’t get caught in your brain. Don’t get caught wondering what you’re supposed to do, and if this is the right thing to do or say, just move forward. That’s how you figure it out. You figure it out by doing, not by thinking, trying to think your way through it.
18:53
Here is my takeaway for today – you are responsible for you. No one else gets to decide for you what to think, feel or do, that is your job. So take responsibility for yourself and what you are choosing. That’s your freedom, that is your agency, that is your gift to yourself. When you give yourself this gift, you bless everybody.
19:19
What is your takeaway? What do you what did you take away from this podcast? I would challenge you to share that with somebody, share this episode with them, or say, just send them a text or a DM and say, Hey, I learned this on a podcast today, and I’m going to be an agent in my life, and I’m not going to make you take responsibility for me anymore.
19:43
You know, in coaching, we figure out who you want to be. We do a lot of work in figuring out what direction do you want to go, and we work on speaking that person into existence. And that looks a lot of different ways.
19:56
You know, family relationships are systems. Everyone has input into the system. It’s been created by the family, and everyone is part of the system. When one person changes their input, the whole system is forced to change. If you want your family relationships to change and you’re ready to change your input, then let’s have a conversation.
20:24
I would love to talk about that with you and see how I can help you. Click the link in the show notes, and you can set up a free consultation with me. We’ll just meet for a few minutes, talk about what you’re talk about what you’re wanting to create in your family and in your life, and we’ll see if we’re a good fit to work together. I’m looking forward to having a conversation with you. Have a great day, and I’ll see you next time.
