Calm Parenting Podcast - How Can You Control Your Emotions & Stop Reacting?

Episode Date: December 21, 2020

How Can You Control Your Emotions & Stop Reacting? How can you control your emotions, stop reacting, and stop allowing your kids’ emotions to control your emotions? You should still FEEL every emotion, but Kirk shows you how to control the anxiety that’s fighting for your attention inside, that causes you to feel guilt, embarrassment, frustration, and fear.  We're bringing back our Black Friday Special for ONE MORE WEEK! We have special deals on the Calm Parenting Package, the Get Everything Package, and the No B.S. Program. Our programs have never been this inexpensive.  Download to multiple devices, share with relatives so they understand you instead of judging you. Change the way you understand, discipline, and motivate your strong-willed child.  Questions? Need help deciding on the best tools for your family? Email [e-mail] and Casey will help you personally!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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emotions to change or dictate or control your emotions? That's tough stuff. That's what we're going to talk about today on the Calm Parenting Podcast. So welcome. This is Kirk Martin, founder of Celebrate Calm. You can find us at Celebrate Calm. If you have trouble controlling your emotions, if you allow your kids to kind of dictate your moods, reach out to our son Casey, because he was awesome at doing that to us. Of course, that was our issue, but he brought that out in us, right? So reach out to him. His name is Casey, C-A-S-E-Y, at CelebrateCalm.com. And he will help you. We will help you as a family.

If you tell us about your family, we'll make some recommendations, some strategies that will help. Make some recommendations on any of our resources. We'll help you fit it within the budget. And right now, it's within your budget because we have a huge, huge Christmas clearance sale. So take advantage of that. So here's what I wanted to go over today. I want to give you, do a few tools that we have.

There's a program called 30 Days to Calm. And it was basically, I spent thousands of dollars through therapy and through really learning how to control myself and stop reacting to kids and everything else. And so I just put all of my knowledge over 20 years into this program where I kind of through really learning how to control myself and stop reacting to kids and everything else. And so I just put all of my knowledge over 20 years into this program where I kind of mentor you through this. And I want to go through a couple different parts of it. And hopefully, you can take this and begin applying this in your own life. So one, I want you to make it a rule in life that you never, ever react. I want you to get it inside that you don't have to react. You don't have to.

You don't owe anybody a reaction. And sometimes we get in this trap because we don't know what else to do, or we feel if we don't, we're letting our kids get away with something. I could do a whole podcast just on that. But just realize that reacting never ever leads to anything good because when you react, you are giving power over your emotions to your child or to a situation or to your spouse or to another person or to a political party or a candidate. When you react to your four or 14 year old, guess who's in control? The kid who is driving you crazy is in the driver's seat. And that's

honestly your issue, not theirs, right? So I want you to start to allow an indignant tone to rise up in you so you can be bold and speak forcefully and say, I refuse to give you power over my day. I don't want you walking around and looking at your four-year-old like, you've got power, that ends now. But say it in your own life, right? I don't personally have a problem with saying something like this in a conversation of like, no, I'm not, I'm not giving that power for my life. I'm not going to give you power over my emotions today. One of my favorite phrases, and I'll try to do a whole podcast on this is looking at the child, throwing a tantrum, whether that child is three or whether a child is 13, because they both throw tantrums just in different ways.

And looking at that child and saying, listen, it's not going to work with me because your mood does not determine my mood. Your behavior does not change my behavior. Your mood does not change my mood. Now, their mood does change your mood, which is why you're listening to the Confirming Podcast. And please share this with others, by the way, because everybody struggles with this. But you have to get to the place where you're not giving them power. One of my favorite things I ever read about George Washington was he used this great phrase. He would often say to people, well, I make it a rule in life that I never do X. And most of us have some unchangeable principles, things that we never do,

right? You don't hit or spit at or starve your kids. So what are the new rules or policies in your home? I use the George Washington phrase often. I make it a rule in life that I never react to children, that I never react to people, that I never make important decisions in a hurry or when I'm tired. I use a lot of those things in my life of like, no, this is just, it's the way that I roll. Second thing I wanted to hit today, when situations change and are disappointing, change your attitude toward it. Now, this isn't necessarily about your kids, but I want to kind of share a story. And then some, because stories sometimes are really good to illustrate things. And then bring up the principles that we learned from it.

So I will try to share also my wisdom as I get older. I'm 54. And when I was younger, I tried to force things a lot. I wanted to make it happen. And I wasn't that patient with things. And I try to jump in and just make it happen because I'm kind of a proactive type A guy. And what I'm learning as I get older is instead of forcing things with a narrow margin for error, right? Because we do that because a lot of us like to create our own drama. We do. And sometimes we like to create our own, um, our own failures in a sense, because then it's like, Oh, now we have something to fix. We

have something to talk about. And so I'm learning to resist doing those things. So I'm learning to let life come to me and be patient so that I can respond instead of react. So quick story. So we traded in our, we had a business vehicle when we were traveling a lot and we just wanted to have a smaller one. So when we arrived to sign the papers, the owner of the car dealership said, look, I've got some bad news. It's going to cost a lot to fix your airbag and dealer has to do it. I can't do it. Now the old Kirk would have fumed and thrown a tiny tantrum because that's what I saw my dad doing and that's what I always did. I probably would have muttered like eff it, you know, a few times or something else really helpful.

Just being honest. It's my natural reaction. I felt disappointed and irritated because I hate when little details mess up my plans. And you have kids who are very, very like that because they have these very, very busy brains and they're always thinking of ideas and they've got an agenda and stuff in their brains of what they want to do. And when little things go wrong, it really messes them up. See, when big things go wrong, well, see, that usually stimulates our brains. And now we jump into action. It's like, oh, I've got a challenge now. Let me throw myself into that. But little details just throw us off. This particular time, I actually stayed in control

of myself. And I told the guy, hey, I'll take care of it and I'll be back. And I didn't embarrass my son by throwing a tantrum in public that time. So I drive to my dealer and I was anxious, right? Whether they could fit me in because I have a big thing. I'm like, I don't like wasting time. I hate standing around and waiting for things like probably most of you, right? And I was wondering, okay, how much is this going to cost? Because I'm also pretty frugal. And I was honestly pretty PO'd, right? Because this is the second car that we had gotten from this particular company that begins with the letters GM and that I've had trouble with, right? And so as I'm pulling into the service bay, I'm wanting to unload on the customer service guy since he works for this company and I can feel it in me. But then I thought, this guy didn't build my car. He didn't make this go wrong. Why am I going to take out my anxiety,

right? Because I've got anxiety about like, how are they going to fix it? Can I get in there? How much is it going to cost? Why am I going to take out my anxiety and frustration on him? So I said, hey, may I ask a favor? Is it possible to get this done before lunch? And so he calls an attack and they agreed to work on an ASAP. So being assertive instead of a jerk actually worked, right? Now the old Kirk would have fumed at this guy, complaining about things he couldn't change. I would have stormed off to the customer lounge and dropped my bag to let everybody know that I'm angry at this dumb car. And I would have felt justified after all, right?

See, it was all about serving my own anxiety. Everything was about me, how it affected me and my day. But instead, this time, I thanked the guy for making my car a priority and I went to the lounge. So I began reading a book. I find that calming. I can get absorbed in a book and for whatever reason, it just really, really helps settle me. Find what is calming to you. You have to have a few go-to things that you can do at any time that work for you. It doesn't matter what it is, but know what you find calming. I worked with teachers because we do a lot of

teacher training and I was like, yeah, it's hard when you've got a class of 20, 25 kids and they're all loud and they're all just having one of those days, you've got to have something there to bring back control. And you don't bring back control of your classroom, your home by walking around. Guys, you know what? After all I do for you, I can't believe you couldn't be quiet. Guys, I'm trying to come up with a good lesson plan. But if you don't, right, that never works.

Right. But I told this teacher, we discovered she is an order person. So I was like, oh, I bet you like crossword puzzles because that's calming to be able to fit the little letters in the little blocks and have it all come together. It's all within your control. So you know what she does when her class is out of control? She goes and she sits on the floor because there's something calming about an adult sitting on the floor. And she just starts doing crossword puzzles. And she becomes a little bit oblivious to what else everybody, all the other kids are doing. But what she's really doing is she is leading them. And you know what happens every time? Kids start grabbing their own stuff, crayons, pencils,

paper to come draw and color and bring their books. And they all come and sit on the floor with her. And she didn't change the kids. She changed herself. And that's how it works at home. The quickest way to change your child's behavior is to first control your own. It's really, really cool. So I'm sitting there reading my book because I'm a dork like that. I love it. When we're on the road, I'll go and sit at a bar and read a book on a Friday night. I don't care really because I'm older now and I know it's just interesting to me and I would rather, because I'm always dealing with people, I'd rather absorb, get into the book at the bar than I would make endless chatting with people. Anyway, so guy comes up to me and he's like, hey, you know,

if you take a test drive, we'll give you $75 off your service today. Now the old Kirk would have scoffed. If you think I'm going to buy one of your piece of crap cars again, you're kidding yourself, right? And I would have made the poor guy feel six inches tall. Again, he didn't have anything to do with my car that wasn't working. And I would have once again proved what a justifiably angry jerk I was. So I went for the drive. 15 minutes for 75 bucks. I'm all over that. So during the drive, I asked this young salesperson questions about himself.

Part of this is getting out of your own anxiety so that you can be interested in other people. And I discovered that he'd had some learning disabilities. It's interesting what happens when you get rid of your own anxiety and you start learning about other people. They will tell you everything. And so he had no idea what I do and I work with kids with learning differences and disabilities and all kinds of things. But he told me that he had just made his first sale the previous day. And so instead of me making it all about me, I was able to encourage him, and that never would have happened before.

So now I'm checking out, and the cashier, who's a woman, appears to be like in her 30s, just says, out of the blue, May I ask you a question, since you're a married guy? I didn't know blue, may I ask you a question since you're a married guy? I didn't know her, but I guess she saw that I was wearing a ring. And she proceeded to tell me about how a couple of married men at the dealership flirt and make comments that make her uncomfortable. And she's afraid to say anything because she can't afford to get fired and doesn't want to be targeted. Now inside, I'm crying for this woman because how vulnerable must she feel to know it's hard to speak up, right? Do I have to take this? And so now she's so vulnerable and in so much pain, she's got to ask a complete stranger, me, for advice.

So I gave her a few pointers on safe things to tell men to get them to back off, as well as some cutting little remarks to put insecure men in their place. Now, this stuff happens. This stuff probably presented itself before, but I was so caught up in my own drama and my own anxiety, I didn't see it. So now, Casey and I head back. We go back to trade in my car. Finally, we're back there. Now, the owner of this little dealership is concentrating intently on writing an email. He tells me that his teenage son has some learning disabilities disabilities and he's wrestling with

the school over some issues. And so I ask a few questions about that and he says, ah, you know, I'm sorry. I'm talking all about my issues and this is supposed to be about me getting you a car. Now the old me would have said inside, yeah, dude, don't really give a rip about your issues. Just give me the keys and let me go. Because it wasn't all about me, I could see the guy needed to vent. An hour later, he says, I really appreciate you listening. So a few lessons that I take from this. One, I felt a wide range of emotions that day. Anger, disappointment, frustration, anxiety, scorn, fear. You're going to feel things. It's normal. There's nothing wrong with feeling all of those things. And being calm doesn't mean you don't feel things. That's what alcohol does. And we don't want that. It's normal.

We don't deny our emotions and we don't ignore them. The difference is that we don't act upon them. We don't react to them. We don't let them control us. The old Kirk would have reacted and taken out my emotions on other people. In a sense, I used to say to my wife, to my son, to everybody I met, I can't deal with my own emotions. So you, wife, son, customer service person, have to manage my emotions for me. That's what four-year-olds do. And that's what a lot of us do. And I want us to change that. And I know there are a lot of reasons for it, but we can't hide behind excuses. We have to

learn to deal with our own emotions. Otherwise, I promise you, your spouse and your kids will, they will be drained and they will have complete power over you. But what's worse for your spouse is now your spouse has to manage your emotions. And that is so emotionally draining and they just get worn out by that. So I want us to learn how to do this. Being calm means that I proactively take care of myself. I don't care what it is. For me, it's intense exercise and my morning walks. When I do that, I can handle just about anything. And I take care of myself, not because it's selfish. In fact, it's selfless. I take care of myself so that others don't have to take care of me. Does that make sense? The gift I give my family, we cover this a lot. There's a CD program that we have

for moms called Straight Talk for Moms. And a lot of it is about learning how to value and respect yourself by taking care of yourself so that everybody else doesn't have to walk on eggshells or behave a certain way because after all I've done for you, I can't believe that is a nasty, nasty little generational pattern that you will pass on to your kids. And I want to break that. And one of the most selfless things you can do is to take care of yourself so that everybody else doesn't have to take care of you. Does that make sense? Being calm means that I control the anxiety that's fighting for my attention inside so

that I can look outward and focus on others. I know that you have really, really, really challenging kids who control the home environment, who pick on their siblings, who are fine one-on-one, but when the whole family's together, it's just a nightmare at times. I know they push your buttons. I know they're oppositional. I get it. I get it. I get it. But what happens is if you will analyze this and really look inside, so much of it gets turned inside of us. And we start thinking, why is he doing that? What am I doing wrong? How are other people going to judge me? What would my parents say? What's going to happen in his future? And all of that anxiety that we internalize makes the situation worse. Part of being calm is so that you can enjoy life,

that you can be a blessing to other people, that you can know how to handle your kids and you can build relationships instead of ruining it because our anxiety causes us to actually ruin our relationships. It poisons our relationships with our spouse and with our kids. And I want to be able to look outward and focus on others, but I've got to control that anxiety. And I like this phrase that's fighting for my attention inside. By the way, I don't have time for this on this podcast, but I go through in that calm program about not creating drama, not getting drawn into drama of that family member who's going through this and about all these other things that are happening. And we just get so enveloped in it because we want the drama.

The drama is feeding us somehow, making us feel important. That's why gossiping about other people, right? It makes us feel like we have information that other people don't have. But it's a nasty little thing that's fighting for your attention inside. And it becomes all about you and me instead of helping the other person. So as I was working out that afternoon, I was reading through my daily affirmations because I kind of like doing that of things that I'm working on. I send up to myself an email so I can really, really focus on changing certain things. And one of my things that I focus on is trying to look

outward, right? Today, I'll be a blessing to three people personally. It's one of my ones I say every day. I want to get my focus outward. And I began to think about the three people that day I was able to encourage rather than dump on. But know that for 35 years, I missed those opportunities. Even though I was outwardly successful, inwardly, I was kind of a mess. Calm has given me back my internal life, which helps me look outward. See, when I walk back in my home, right now, I'm not like, can't believe what happened today. And then how's your spouse to, when you come home every day, how's your spouse supposed to react every single day when there's always some kind of drama or something went wrong and you can't handle it? That doesn't mean that you shouldn't ask your spouse to help you and

support you in that. Not at all. But I don't want to dump on them every day and then expect they're going to be like, oh, can't wait till Kirk gets home so I can hear what he's irritated about today. Well, hopefully he listened to talk radio for six hours so that he'll be really upset, right? That's not what they want. So when I got home though, I had an email waiting from the car guy. You know what he said? Meeting you and your son was the highlight of my month. Now see, that's where things change. It's really, really, really cool. So work on that. Let me run through really quickly before we close on this. A few other things. Stop participating in drama. Again,

I could do a whole podcast if you want me to. Email us and tell me, and I can do that. Apologize and reset quickly. When I'm with Casey especially, and there are times on the road when it's intense and tense and we're tired, and I'll react in a bad way, in a negative way, apologize quickly. Hey, Casey, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have taken that out on you. And when I own my stuff, hey, you know what? That was my own anxiety because I'm anxious about getting to this place. I'm anxious about your future. I'm anxious about this. Own it. Apologize quickly. You know what your kids are going to do? They often actually make excuses for you because they'll often say, oh, dad, I understand. I know you're tired, right?

He will make excuses. But if I dig in like, well, it's not my issue, then he knows I'm just being a four-year-old, right? And that apology keeps the tension from seeping into the rest of the day, into the rest of the interactions. Because otherwise, when we're checking in and carrying in our luggage and doing everything else, I'm just going to be on edge. A couple more. Plan a different response to your triggers is one of my favorite things. If you get our programs, get the Christmas clearance sale, get the programs. One of the things that we do in here is we identify your triggers. I want to know what triggers you. Why does that trigger you? And then we walk through it in, okay, when my daughter speaks to me like that, it irritates me and I don't like it. Am I going to give my daughter

power over my mood and my attitude right now? In the past, I have responded by yelling, lecturing, taking away privileges, stomping off, withdrawing. The results of my past reaction has been blank. It's been negative. It's created the opposite result of what I was looking for. It separated me from my child, made me feel guilty, left everyone in the house feeling tense. So I want to change my reaction. So now, next step, instead of reacting by yelling, withdrawing, instead, I'm going to take a positive action. And one of the things we get to in a program you'll hear is doing the opposite of what you normally do is one of the keys for me changing. I realized that what I was doing, how I was reacting to Casey especially, was not working.

I was getting the exact opposite result that I wanted. So I thought, well, if what I'm doing right now is resulting in me getting the opposite of what I want, what if I started doing the opposite of what I'm doing now? And miraculously, it worked because, right, does that make sense? I started doing the opposite. And I'd have this phrase in my head of like, okay, let's just do the opposite. What I normally do is react. My voice gets tense like this, start talking like this. And I start pointing out all the things that he's doing wrong. Well, that doesn't work.

So what can I do differently? I want you to practice that this week because you've got a lot of tension coming up because we've got the holidays and we've got a lot of stuff going on and I want us to be able to practice this so that we can start to make some changes. And I really, really want to jump on this

maybe even after the holidays as we're going to make some changes. And I really, really want to jump on this, maybe even after the holidays as we're going into the new year. I don't care about all the resolutions that you're not going to keep. Let's be very firm in what we do want to change. And let's come up with a game plan. I promise if you work through our programs and you have them, you can email me and I will walk through. And you can email me and say, here through and you can email me and say, here's my trigger. What can I do differently? And if you're willing to work hard and change

yourself, I will work hard along with you because I want to see generational patterns change and I want your family different in 2021. So let's hop all over this. If we can help you in any way, call or email our difficult, challenging son who is awesome and will treat you with great care. Casey at CelebrateCalm.com. We appreciate you sharing this podcast. We appreciate you listening. Love you all. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.