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Welcome to Rethink Your Rules with Jenny Hobbs, MD, a fresh perspective on relationships, success and happiness for high achieving moms.
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Hey there, it's Jenny. Welcome back to another episode of Rethink Your Rules. This week, I am going to share some of the most common unspoken rules that I recommend you rethink. So, obviously, I named my podcast Rethink Your Rules for a reason, and it's been a while since I did that, and we have a lot of new listeners. So just as sort of a refresher.
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The reason that I talk about this is because many of us busy, high achieving, working moms have adopted these unspoken, unwritten rules about how we should show up in the world. Throughout our lives, we've been offered these things by our parents and our teachers and for those of us in medicine, you know, our medical career or other, you know, really demanding careers, science, engineering careers, law, things like that.
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They've given us all these rules, okay, if you want to succeed, if you want us to like you, if you want to get ahead, here's what you do. And we've really internalized those. And not all of those rules are bad or always bad, but what happens is some of those rules begin to work against us later in life, but we have been following them for so long.
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that they're just sort of in the background. We don't even realize that we're following them. And we don't even realize that that is part of why we are so unhappy with these lives we've built. We worked so hard, we did everything right. We followed all these unspoken rules and we've achieved these external things like a great career. And we've got the two healthy kids and we've got a partnership. And many of my clients have a partner, male or female of some kind that's supportive. And theoretically everything should be fine, but they're finding that
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they're thinking something's wrong with them because they're not happy or they're stressed or they're overwhelmed or they're exhausted or maybe the career looks good but they are getting stuck, not getting the promotion they want or people are telling them their communication is poor or maybe they're fighting with their partner or whatever the case may be. What I've found in my experience of coaching, doing my certifications and working with my clients and coaching myself is that...
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Many of us need to take a step back and really articulate to ourselves which of these rules we are following, possibly subconsciously or unconsciously, and we need to re-examine them and take a little bit more ownership of deciding whether or not we want to keep following them. And it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to abandon these rules or that you're going to
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just stop following them forever in every situation. But it means that we become intentional about how and when we use these rules and when we want to intentionally break those rules and rewrite them and write our own rules because we have a different goal that we want to achieve. And it'll make some sense, I think, as I go through some of these examples. But.
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That's the whole point of this podcast is to, and I very intentionally named it rethink, not rewrite, because I don't think you have to necessarily rewrite all your rules, but I do want you to rethink them before you keep following them. Okay. Make sure they're working for you and maybe edit them a little bit, right, if you need to. And I intentionally said your rules and not the rules because I believe each of us needs to decide this for ourselves and it may look different for different people.
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And even the word rules is chosen intentionally as well, because sometimes these thoughts or these rules are really just thoughts that we've thought over and over and they've become beliefs, right? And some of them we are holding to so tightly like they are rules, like they can't be broken. And sometimes that's part of the problem. Like perhaps it doesn't even need to be a rule at all. Maybe it could be a suggestion or it could be a consideration, right?
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So really just softening all of that up and taking our ownership back. That's what this podcast is all about. And so when I talk about different specific stories or examples, if you really look at them and think about it, like if I'm telling a story about my kids, often my kids are teaching me something where I'm questioning a rule that I didn't even realize I was following, right? Or an interaction at work makes me question it. Or one of my clients says something that makes me question it. So the heart of all this work is just to give you the chance.
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to come here for a few minutes each week and reflect with me on where you can maybe improve your life by rethinking your rules. And recently I heard the term that's used in psychology a lot, cognitive flexibility, and I was like, oh, that's what I've been talking about all the time. I didn't know it had this name. But cognitive flexibility is such an important skill and it is a skill that we can grow. And that's the idea of
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taking these thoughts that we've thought over and over and they've become beliefs and they've become things we like cling to, you know, they're very black and white and they're rules and all this stuff and taking those things and just being flexible enough to loosen up a little bit and question them. I have this client that talks about the idea of holding onto things a little bit more loosely, a little less tightly, right? Doesn't have to be a dramatic shift, but just being holding those beliefs a little bit.
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more gently, loosely with more flexibility, considering the possibility of another way of thinking, I believe is one of the biggest skills that you can develop and it makes you a better human. You're going to show up better for other people. You're going to take care of yourself better. And to be honest, it's not a skill that a lot of us are taught. I mean, oh my gosh, if you've been through medical training, there's not a lot of like cognitive flexibility. It's like, this is the right way. It's drilled into you. And I think we have a tendency to really like the black and white and...
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very rational, logical, scientific things, and that can make it harder to be open-minded about having cognitive flexibility. But when it comes to relationships and dealing with other people and finding happiness and fulfillment in our life, cognitive flexibility is really important. So what I wanted to do today was to give you a quick overview of the most common rules that I help my clients rethink and the most common unspoken rules that we sort of uncover in our work together. What I found is that for working...
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moms who are high achievers like myself possibly dealing with neurodiversity or some neurodiversity, ADHD, autism, things like that in their kids. Typically, the rules that we are following unconsciously or semi-consciously fall into kind of five general categories. And what you'll notice that these five things have in common is they are all ways that we are attempting to feel better.
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And so we're telling ourselves with these rules, I need this thing in order to feel better. And remember, as I've talked about before, as humans from a very basic primitive standpoint, our goal, our strongest motivation is always to feel good, feel better, right? So seek something positive that feels positive to us or avoid something that feels negative. And so each of these are just the rules we've told ourselves about what we need to feel good. And what I'm saying is that we can question this a bit. Okay, so the first one is in order to feel better, I need
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them to change or this situation to change. You're thinking that the other person needs to change what they're doing or saying so that you can feel better. They hurt my feelings. They are being rude to me. Or I need the situation to change. I need myself to have more money or I need this plane to take off on time or I need to live in a place where the weather is better in order for me to feel better.
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Okay, so that's the first one. I like to think of it in relationships. This is the concept I have discussed a few times called emotional immaturity. So I need this other person to do something so I feel better. But it can also just be about a situation that doesn't involve a person, right? In order to feel better, I need the situation to change. And then that what I would call arguing with reality, right? So arguing with the hard parts of life and wishing that they weren't there.
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resisting them, right? And I have some fellow coaches who call this control enthusiasm, which I really love and I might adopt because, you know, I think as women who are running households and juggling all the things and we're really over-functioning high achievers, we want to control the environment. That's our goal. I want to control, I want to make sure my son looks and says things the right way. My daughter does this, my husband does this, my job does this, my bank account looks this way, right? So we are...
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sometimes running ourselves ragged because we believe that if we can just control these external situations and people to be the best way that we think is the best way, then we're going to feel better. Right? So that's the first one. In order to feel better, I need them to change or I need this to change. The second one is in order to feel better, I need to get everything right. I need to do things right.
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Now, this to me is the heart of perfectionism. You might be saying, but I'm not a perfectionist. I don't think I need to be perfect. But I would definitely keep an eye out here, because for many people, they think they're not a perfectionist because they don't do things perfectly, but they spend a lot of their time thinking, I need to do it right. I need to do that right. And if someone says they did something wrong or they made a mistake, they become very defensive. And this is not they. I should say me and we, all the women I know that we have, a lot of us have this problem.
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So that is a form of perfectionism. And so when you're thinking, you know, in order to feel better, I need to be getting this right, that's putting a lot of pressure on you.
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And let's be honest, it's not very realistic. The third one is in order to feel better, I need them to approve of me. I need everyone's approval. And so this, as you can see, is people pleasing. And it doesn't always look pleasant or pleasing. And I've talked about this before. What it looks like is sometimes working so hard to do whatever it is you think is going to make that person think you're smart, or think you're capable, or think you're correct, or think you're, or yes, something maybe
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that pleases them or that they said they wanted. And sometimes it can be kind of sneaky with the people pleasing. Like you can catch yourself doing it just because it's kind of what you've been trained to do as a woman. The third one is, or the fourth one, excuse me, is in order to feel better, I need to get more done and to accomplish more. I think of this as hustle mentality or hustle culture. So a lot of us have been given this from a young age, right? We've got our checklist. And if I check all these things off, then I'll feel better.
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It's really this thing that's been ingrained in us that being busy and productive and doing things in this
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almost like capitalistic way, right? More and more and more is what we need to feel good about ourselves and to feel like we are accomplished and to feel like we are enough.
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And I think sometimes this is easiest to notice when it doesn't work, right? Actually, many of these are easier to notice when it doesn't work, right? When you feel terrible and you feel like you can't keep up with everything. And then you realize it's because, you know, you're beating yourself up because you should have gotten more done that day or because, you know, you wasted time just relaxing and didn't get something.
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done as efficiently as you could, and you're kind of feeling badly about it. Maybe it's not a huge feeling, but it's niggling at you and making you feel frustrated or stressed out or whatever. You might realize, oh gosh, this is because I'm thinking that my worth comes, and my value, and my feeling good comes from completing things and being proud of how much I did and proud of how I spent my time. And that's an insidious one, because it sounds so good, but it can really be the core of a lot of our
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discomfort and it can force us to say yes and over schedule ourselves and to really not take care of ourselves when we need to. The fifth one is in order to feel better, I need things to be rational or things to be logical or other people to be logical. I call this hyper rationality and I really think this one is an interesting one because those of us that have been in scientific careers, medicine of course, we're not going to be
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We spend so much time in the rational, cognitive, black and white realm, and we're really comfortable there. And it's overemphasized in our society in general, right? We always want people to be making sense and doing what makes sense. And as soon as we understand something, we think other people understand it. And we think there's a right and a wrong, and it's just our brains love that, right? But the fact of the matter is people are not rational.
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Okay? And so if you're in a conversation with another human, even if you are in a hospital where there's a black and white right and wrong, that other person is not necessarily going to behave based on rational factors or what seems rational to you because they have their own emotions at play and our emotions are kind of getting in the way of that. And again, we do things because of our emotions. And so if you are only comfortable and everything is rational, you're going to have a really hard time being happy because
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your kids are not going to be rational. Like if you have teenagers or you have kids who are neurodiverse like mine, or a little challenging, or toddlers, right? You've seen it. And really everyone to some degree, some maybe more dramatically than others, is driven by their emotions. And so when we live by this rule that people need to be rational for us to feel comfortable, we're kind of setting ourselves up to be frustrated a lot of the time. And it can really make things challenging when you're dealing with relationships and people. And so...
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Like with all of these rules, they have their place and they're useful and they're important. A lot of this is why we've been successful. But at some point, you know, after doing that for several years, you accomplish a certain amount professionally and personally, and then you're gonna skid to a halt. And that's what my clients told me. You come to a halt and it's like, something's not working because I'm unhappy and I'm overwhelmed and I'm exhausted and I'm not feeling good and I don't understand why because I'm still following all the rules that were supposed to make me happy, right? But they were these five rules which don't work for every situation for every single person.
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We really have to dial back and get that cognitive flexibility about these rules and consider whether we need these things to be happy or could we work on finding other ways to look at things to feel better, right? And it's not, you know, something where I can give you all the answers because again, it's very personal to you and your situation. But the first step is simple and it doesn't have to take you a lot of time. You've listened to this, you could literally go through your week this week and just notice, okay.
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When you don't feel right, when you get this twinge of being annoyed, irritated, frustrated, overwhelmed, just kind of ask yourself, are some of these rules popping up for me? Which ones are most commonly affecting my day-to-day life? Maybe you'll notice one or two of them are more prominent for you or more of a struggle for you. Maybe think of the most difficult relationship or interaction you have on a weekly basis and then each time you interact with that person, think, okay, something's going on here. What are these rules?
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something is happening that falls into one of these five categories that's affecting that. And I want you to focus on just noticing it and naming it first, because so often we try to skip past this and, you know, I can give you all the mantras and all the new ways to think and we'll get there. In fact, next week, I'll talk about some of the thoughts that helped me rethink these particular rules, but you have to notice them, accept them and recognize them for what they are, which is part of you and part of what's made you successful. And I want you also to see how powerful it is to just...
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name them to yourself, just to begin to notice your thoughts. Because if you do that, you're ahead of like 90% of the world. I'm telling you, most people are thinking all these thoughts and subconsciously and it's affecting their day to day life and they have no idea. And when you begin to pick up on that, you develop a skill that you can apply to every part of your life. Right? This is the core of self coaching is noticing those silent thoughts that are going by thousands of them a day, right? And naming them to yourself. So
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Notice where you're engaging in these thoughts, where they might be not serving you anymore. Don't beat yourself up about it. Don't try to change yourself right away. Just question them, just like, okay, could I hold that a little bit more lightly? Is that serving me? Do I really believe that? Okay. And then what I'm going to do next week is I will go through, you know, each of these and talk about some of the ways you can begin to rethink them with some specific examples of thoughts that have helped me.
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If you don't want to wait, or if you want to dig a little deeper on this, you can go to the show notes and there is a free webinar that I did, which was all about these five rules and how you can rethink them in order to feel better. And it's full of info. And I also have a download of all my slides from that webinar, which puts all of this into writing. So if you're a visual person like me, even if you don't watch the whole webinar, you could consider just downloading those slides. So you have this to look at as you listen to this podcast over the next couple of weeks.
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and you can kind of follow along. So I put that link in the show notes, it's totally free, you can download it there. And then I also just wanted to point out that this is really building on what I talked about for a couple of episodes earlier this summer. So if you go back to the episode from July 7th, it's called This One Question Can Change Your Life, I talked about asking yourself, why is this a problem for me? Okay, and this ties into that because when you ask yourself, why is this a problem for me?
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Often you will find that one of these five rules is at the heart of why it's a problem for you. See, so there is a message to my madness here, right? You ask yourself, why is this a problem for me? You get your answer, you dig deeper on that and tell it, you know, keep asking yourself, if it's superficial, keep asking, because I guarantee you, we'll come back down to one of these five categories. So that was the episode from July 7th, this one question can change your life, kind of ties in nicely with this episode, you know.
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Take some time this week to really think about this. If you want something visual to follow along with or to think about it in a little bit more depth, check out the free webinar, which will be linked in the show notes, which also has a download of the slides from that webinar. And as always, if this is feeling overwhelming or confusing or...
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You're kind of getting stuck on applying it to your own life. I want to remind you that is what I'm here for. I have room for one-on-one clients and I absolutely love being able to connect with you, do private personalized sessions where we can really dig in and make this work for you.
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I know it feels sometimes scary to talk to someone. I am literally the least judgmental person in the world. I have heard everything, nothing surprises me and I have so many great tools that I'm here to help you with. So don't think that you have to do this on your own and don't think that it's not worth it. Okay, you give so much to everyone every single day, every single week. It is so, so easy to put our own needs on the back burner.
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And I'm here to take care of you. I always tell people, it's like a massage for your brain. Let me meet with you once a week. It'll be a massage for your brain. I will take care of you. I will help you stay accountable so that you can show up as the best version of yourself and enjoy your life again. And trust me, it will pay back so many dividends in your life.
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So if that's where you're at, I'm here. Set up a consult. If you're still on the fence, totally fine. So much free content in that webinar and in this podcast. So dig in and be sure to subscribe and stick around for lots more free content coming your way. Bye.
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Thanks for listening to Rethink Your Rules with Jenny Hobbs MD. Would you like to learn more about how to apply this to your own life through personalized coaching with Jenny? Visit us on the web at jennyhobbsmd.com to schedule a free consultation. If you found value in what you heard today, please consider subscribing to the podcast and giving us a 5-star rating so we can reach even more women like you.