Hey, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I have been loving doing so many amazing interviews. When we have a solo episode, like today, I feel like it’s just you and me catching up, maybe with a cozy blanket, maybe something yummy to drink. I love that so much too. I know a lot of you listen to me while you’re walking and out and about, so it just feels like so much fun to be out and about together.
Today, we’re going to talk about acceptance, which is one of the topics that comes up in basically every coaching scenario. We’re going to talk about it today in a way I don’t think you’ve heard it addressed before. I’ve never thought about it this way before, and once I saw this new angle, I just really wanted to share it with everyone. We are also going to talk about the difference between rejecting something, accepting something and transcending something. I think this is really one of those episodes that will make you think about your life, about your relationship with yourself, about your relationship with your partner, and anything that is creating distress in your experience right now. Maybe through rejecting, accepting, and transcending and understanding the distinctions between these three, we might be able to hopefully bring some relief to that distress.
If this is your very first time hearing the podcast, welcome, I’m so glad you’re here. If you are a regular podcast listener, thank you for being here. I have an ask for you today. Would you leave me a review? I always forget to ask for them and they do help people discover the show. I would be ever so grateful if you would leave a review. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for a while and you have a favorite takeaway, please include that in your review. I think people love hearing other people’s stories and takeaways and that’s just something so powerful, so thank you. If you can leave a review for the podcast, I would absolutely love that.
Okay, I always like to share my news, a little bit of the behind the scenes of what’s going on in Maggie Land, as I like to call it. As I record this particular episode, one cohort of The Marriage MBA is ending and another one is starting. I feel such a beautiful mix of emotions, pride for what we’ve accomplished over the last six months in the group that is ending, excitement to welcome new and returning students. Yes, you can do the program more than once. I have been in my same business mastermind for two years and I’ve done multiple rounds and I just keep growing with it. As I evolve, my experience with the program evolves and I absolutely love it.
Some of my students will come into The Marriage MBA and have one big thing they want to work on or turn around in their relationship and they do that and they’re done, and some of my students really want to be in the energy of prioritizing your marriage, having a weekly call where that’s all that they think about, is their relationship with themselves or relationship with their partner, and they come back. There’s no one right way to do it, there’s only the way that works for you. If you love what I share on the podcast and you haven’t checked out The Marriage MBA yet, definitely go to marriage, to marriage, to MaggieReyes.com, not marriage, to MaggieReyes.com/group, and get all the details about the program there.
My other big news that I mentioned, I’ve mentioned before in the podcast that I am a double-certified coach. I went to two amazing coaching schools and I love them both so much, The Life Coach School for the cognitive focus and Vita Coaching Institute for the somatic focus. I just recently got accepted into master coach training at The Life Coach School, my alma mater. It is the highest designation that they certify and requires a next level of focus and commitment. I am both scared and excited about the whole thing.
I think it’s important to say that we can be both scared and excited at the same time. I think part of what I try to do on the podcast on a regular basis is just normalized humanity, the human experience, just being real, having bloopers, like I just had earlier moments ago, especially when you’re the one in the family that is seen as the one that has it all together. I know that is how my friends and many of my colleagues see me, because they tell me. I just want you to know that I’m both scared and excited at the same time about something. This weekend I burned some planting chips that I was warming for my hubby. I put my reading glasses, I have reading glasses by the way, in my pocket and forgot where I put them, this is so funny, and I was literally wearing another pair while wearing the shirt that had the pocket with my glasses in it. They were on my actual body and I had forgotten where I put them. Just behind the scenes of the humanity of it all, lest anyone believed that I have everything figured out.
I just show up every day and do my best, and I really invite everyone to just let that be enough. I think that’s something that comes up in my coaching calls and in my teaching calls on a regular basis, it’s like, what is enough, and can just our best at any given moment be enough? I’m really in this phase in my life where bringing humanity into everything is so important to me. Nothing is perfect, everything has layers, it can be beautiful and full of wonder and no perfection is necessary for that. I think that about marriage and about so many other things. I always say, nothing has to be perfect to be awesome. I think accepting our humanity and our partner’s humanity goes so well with this idea of acceptance 2.0 that we’re going to talk about today.
I have another episode on using acceptance to make your marriage stronger, and we will link to that in the show notes. Today’s episode is kind of like a deeper version of that idea, sort of a riff off of that idea. I was coaching a client and I told her that I would dedicate this episode to her, so she knows when I tell the story who she is, this episode is for you. In coaching her, she helped me get so clear on this because she was struggling with acceptance and feeling so frustrated. We were just talking about it and talking about it from different angles, and as we were brainstorming together, what I’m going to share today on the episode is really what we explored and realized together.
She had this idea that accepting something meant or means that you are embracing it. If we take it literally, in just the regular dictionary, you pull out the word acceptance, it can be receiving something or agreeing with something, but in the context of coaching or in the context of thinking about our relationship with ourselves and the context of your personal development, the way I like to think about it and how my mentor, Brooke, the founder of The Life Coach School, taught me to think about it is that acceptance is not agreement. It is much closer to acknowledgement. I acknowledge your presence, I acknowledge this thing that is happening. I admit that it is here and I experience it as being present. I don’t argue about the thing and why it shouldn’t be here or why it’s wrong or bad or insufficient, I just notice that it’s here.
If we think about acceptance 2.0, I offer you to think about it like acknowledging or noticing. As I was thinking about this episode and writing up my notes, I really thought about acceptance 2.0, being like a mindfulness exercise. Imagine walking through your life and saying to everything, the good, the bad, the wonderful, the irrelevant, the big burrito of life as I like to think about it, it’s all mixing together, imagine walking through that big burrito of life and saying, “I see you, I acknowledge you, I notice you.”
In order to accept something in this context, what you’re doing is being present with it. The big breakthrough that I had with my client, and that I wanted to share with everyone, is you do not need to hug it or embrace it in order to see it. You do not have to hug it to accept it. Listen, if you struggle with accepting yourself, as some of us do, and we’ll come back to at different chapters of our life, we’ll have a struggle on maybe something we discover about ourselves that isn’t delightful that we struggle to accept, but if you struggle to accept something about yourself or your honey or a family member or a coworker, are you trying to hug it, embrace it, or are you just trying to see it, the thing, the feeling, the person, the behavior, the result, the sensation in your body?
My invitation to you today is to stop trying to embrace it and hug it and just start acknowledging it, just start noticing it, just start seeing it. The example we talked about when I was coaching on this with my client is it’s like you’re walking down the street and you see a fire hydrant. You don’t rush over to the fire hydrant and hug it. That would be so silly, but we do this with so many things in our lives, or we feel bad because we don’t want to hug the fire hydrant. You would never feel guilty or like something was wrong or missing for having no desire to hug a fire hydrant. You just notice that it’s there. When you notice it’s there, you determine if you need to walk around it, cross the street, pause when you get closer, or take any action at all because of its presence. Sometimes no action is needed, but you have to see it in order to make that determination.
Just think about anything you’re struggling with accepting right now. Maybe it’s a partner’s behavior, maybe it’s a situation in your family, maybe it’s something that’s just bringing you distress. I invite you to stop trying to hug it and just start seeing it instead. If your honey, let’s say, has some habit that you don’t love, or you’re disappointed by something in yourself and you try to embrace it and that feels off and wrong, it’s like, “Oh, I just need to notice it. I don’t need to love it, I just need to notice it.” Seeing that can be so, so helpful. You just have to see it clearly. The moment you see it, clearly you can have authority over it.
A lot of the things that I talk about on the podcast and the concepts that I share with everyone, the purpose of them is to create awareness around what’s happening, to create that noticing, that seeing, that acknowledgement. My hypothesis is once we have awareness around something, we have authority over it. Then we can decide what to about it. If I have no awareness about something, I can’t do anything about it.
It’s kind of like in business, you cannot manage what you do not measure. If you’re not measuring something, you have no awareness of how many widgets were produced or what the budget was for a particular month or anything like that. If you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it. This is really the same idea. The moment you have awareness around it, you have authority over it, then you can decide what to do about it. This does not require being delighted by this thing or embracing it or even feeling better about it. Imagine in a business example, okay, we have 52,000 widgets. I don’t have to have any feeling about that, I can just see the number of the widgets that we have.
Now, what is the difference between rejecting it, accepting it and embracing it? Rejecting is when we see the fire hydrant, the metaphorical fire hydrant, and think it shouldn’t be there in the first place. We stop walking, stop moving forward, and just ruminate about all the terrible reasons it’s there and all the ways that’s wrong. That is rejecting versus accepting. When we’re focusing on the problems, for example in our marriages, we’re coming from a place of rejection, this is wrong and this is bad and this shouldn’t be. If you’ve listened to the podcast for a while and if you have something that’s going on in your relationship that’s bringing you distress, you know that doesn’t work. The way that I like to talk about anything we’re rejecting, is from a place of rejection, we can’t move forward, but from a place of accepting, of acknowledgement, we can. What we want to do is move forward. We don’t want to stay stuck in that circle.
It might sound like, “What? I can move out of the circle by accepting this, but I don’t want this anymore.” I’m not telling you to keep the thing you don’t want. Imagine the fire hydrant. I’m not telling you to move in next to the fire hydrant and make a camp there. Until you see the fire hydrant … Let’s say it’s yellow, let’s say I think it should be red. If I just argued with the fire hydrant, like, “Why are you yellow? You should be red,” and I just spent 15 minutes with this fire hydrant, it wouldn’t make it red, I wouldn’t move forward. As opposed to, if I see it, “Oh, it’s yellow. I think it should be red. Let me go buy some red paint,” and then half an hour later, I have a red fire hydrant. Assuming that I could paint one in this magical fairy tale land in which I live, in which I have control over the fire hydrants and wouldn’t get in trouble for painting one.
Rejecting is when we see the fire hydrant, think it shouldn’t be there in the first place, you stop walking, stop moving forward. That’s rejecting versus accepting. As I mentioned, the way this shows up often in your marriage is you argue about the thing, but you don’t move forward because you get so focused on how it shouldn’t be happening in the first place that you don’t spend any energy on deciding where you want to go from here and then going there. Okay? That’s rejecting and accepting.
Now, let’s talk about transcending. To transcend is to rise above or go beyond. I love that definition, I just Googled it. To transcend is to rise above or go beyond. Sometimes what we need to practice, whether with ourselves or with our partners, is acceptance. Sometimes what we need to do instead of accepting something, just noticing it, is to rise above it and go beyond, is transcend it. One of my friends, a brilliant woman named Jacqueline Gates, posted a quote on Facebook a while back. She said, “What if you didn’t have to focus or work on unraveling and changing your limiting beliefs, but rather focused on becoming the version of you that doesn’t have them?” I’m just going to say that again, it was so good. What if you didn’t have to work on unraveling or changing your limiting beliefs, but rather focused on becoming the version of you that doesn’t have them?
Reading that quote from Jacqueline helped me flesh out something that has been on my mind for a while. I just had one of those moments of clarity, where it just all came together in my brain. I’m really going to invite you to think about your thinking now, we’re going to think about how we think, how we look at things. We’re going to think about our perspective, we’re going to zoom out. Some people grow by deeply accepting that their limiting beliefs are just that, they are thoughts that they are having that are limiting them in some way from creating a result they want in their life. They are not ever powerful dictates on their destiny, they are sentences that produce results when acted upon. Some people need time and space to live in the knowledge of what that sentence creates.
Sometimes something that I thought, a limiting belief that I coach on quite a bit, is my partner doesn’t care. Sometimes we just need to see I’m having the thought that my partner doesn’t care, sometimes my partner demonstrates caring in ways that aren’t what I expected or aren’t what I was looking forward to.
Very often I will mention, and I’ll link to this in the show notes, I have an episode called Rethinking the Five Love Languages, and the whole idea is many times our partners show us love and caring in ways that are easy and natural for them, but aren’t necessarily easy and natural for us to receive in that way, and very often we discount what they’re showing us because it isn’t packaged the way we expect it to come packaged. That would be a sentence in my mind. It’s like, “My partner doesn’t care.” I’m having the thought. Some need to spend some time and give some space to noticing when I believe my partner doesn’t care, I show up in my relationship as if my partner doesn’t care and very what often starts happening as I start caring less because of how I’m showing up, because of the sentence I have in my brain.
Now, some people need to spend time living their life without that sentence. They need to rise above and go beyond that sentence. They need to transcend that sentence, it’s not even relevant anymore. A lot of the work that we do in coaching involves an element of accepting some things, transcending others, and then just making decisions about which one is more appropriate at any given time. Then there’s setting boundaries and having standards and making requests and all this stuff that we talk about on the podcast all the time.
When someone needs to spend time in transcendence, rising above that sentence for example, spending even more time and acceptance turns out to be not as useful. It’s still useful, but it’s not as completely tectonic plate shifting useful as stepping into their highest and best self that expresses in a whole new way, that shows up in the relationship the way they want to show up because it’s who they want to be in the world, not for their partner’s response. As a coach supporting clients, teaching students, sometimes I need to help my clients focus on acceptance, sometimes I need to help them focus on transcendence, sometimes in the same session or the same class or workshop.
For those familiar with intentional models, the self-coaching model is something that I use in my coaching. We’ll link to the podcast episode where I talk about that, it’s called Relationship Mastery, but we’ll link to that in the show notes. For those familiar with intentional models and unintentional models, which is basically an intentional thought or a default thought that isn’t creating the result we want, we can think about how sometimes our time is best spent seeing our limiting beliefs and the results they produce, what we would call an unintentional model, and we arrive at transcendence through accepting this thought that we’re having. Sometimes our best time, our time is best spent, investigating and thinking about and going out into the world and practicing becoming the part of ourselves that lives from a totally different perspective that is completely intentional and is living into the intention that they want to see, experience and love in their life.
For example, if I decide to embody myself as a powerful and loving wife, what does that version of me that is powerful and loving think and say and do? I put all my focus on that and knowing her inside out like a character that I’m building. It’s so interesting when we think about building character. I am building my character as that person who is powerful and loving. I have this hypothesis that sometimes when we get stuck in our own growth, when we feel like we’re not moving forward, we need to check, do we need to be more in acceptance or more in transcendence? You just want to check in.
My friend Jacqueline, when she shared that quote that inspired me to write this, she also shared something for Buckminster Fuller, which is, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something,” so think about your marriage, “You build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” You just build a new model, you do it a new way. This reminds me of Henry Ford. I think about this quote so often, especially with my friends who are innovators and doing so many new different things and thinking about life differently or marriage differently. Henry Ford said, “If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would’ve said faster horses.” Think about that for a sec, right?
I think about when the iPhone first came out and everybody had all of the keys, they had the Blackberry, it was the thing to have and all the keys were in your phone. If you would have asked someone who had a Blackberry what they wanted, they would have said maybe more color or a bigger screen or something like that. What Apple did and what Henry Ford did is to change something, they just put the whole new model that made the existing model of how we thought about transportation or how we thought about phones obsolete. Imagine doing that in your marriage. That is what my highest intention is for this podcast to do, is to render the past model obsolete and move forward powerfully in a new model.
What is the current model of your marriage? What would the new model that makes it obsolete be? Take your brain there. If you’d love to journal, this is something awesome to journal on. What is the current model of your marriage? What would the new model that makes it obsolete be? Think about things like how you communicate today, where you get stuck, where you go in circles. What would happen if the whole way of being in communication became obsolete? If you had to accept, if you had to practice some acceptance and accept this way that I’m doing it now isn’t working and then decided to focus on creating what does work, and you kept your eye on that vision and returned to that vision over and over and over again for the way you want to communicate every day in your relationship.
That’s exactly what we do in coaching, it’s what we do in The Marriage MBA, we build new models. We look at the models we have, the current experiences and outcomes we are living in. We accept them, we notice them, this is where we are, like a point of origin on GPS, and then we determine where we want to go. If it was a city, I would call it thriving city. We want to leave Struggle Town And go to thriving. How do we get to thriving? Well, we have to leave struggle town to get there, and the only way we can leave struggle town is by pinpointing it on the map. That’s the noticing, seeing where it is and going in another direction intentionally. Think about that.
Okay, that was a little deep today. That is all for today. I’m going to call you all, with love, my beautiful peonies. I don’t even know if I’m pronouncing it correctly. This is how I say peonies, hopefully that’s the right way. That is my favorite flower and I have decided that anyone I love is a peony to me. I will be back next week with more ways to make your marriage stronger. I absolutely love you all, I’m sending you all the biggest hug. This week, I invite you to think about what you need to accept, what you want to transcend and rise above. If you leave a review on the podcast, another angel will get her wings, and that angel is you. Thank you so much for being here. Have a beautiful day.