#24 | I just want them to be happy.

Watch the webclass, "4-Part Roadmap to Encourage Adulting Actions."

Get the Preview of the workbook, When Autism Grows Up by Lynn C Davison, Adulting Coach, Available in Fall 2022.

Download, "The Quick Start Guide to STEAR Mapping"

RESOURCES

• STEAR MAP Phone Wallpaper
• THE GAP AND THE GAIN
• FOCUS ON THE GAIN Phone Wallpaper
• THE GAP AND THE GAIN by Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy
• Stuart Shanker's book SELF-REG and website self-reg.ca
• Jon Kabat Zinn's book Wherever You Go, There You Are.

Hi, it's Lynn, your adulting coach. Today I want to cover one of the concerns that our members brought up. And let me just remind myself, it's from Sarah. And so Sarah, this one's for you. I help autistic young adults and their families systemize adulting and I want to thank you for watching this video.

I'm going to start out with a framework again from Barb Avila, Author of SEEING AUTISM. Then, let me just take that and understand what's going on. Then we want to connect with both ourselves and our artistic adults and then we want to practice. Practice helping them and us with the concepts that I think are useful that have helped me and my family.

UNDERSTAND

So the first thing in the understanding part of this situation is that we need to find the facts versus the story that we're telling ourselves.

So the facts can't hurt us, because they just are. It's the story that we tell ourselves about those facts that creates our emotions and our actions. And that's what I really want.

That's what I teach at The Art of Adulting and I work with a lot of my autistic young adults. Exactly that: separating the facts from the story really helps. It really helps to give us the power to manage ourselves in a way that's more consistent with how we want to show up. What our ideal self is. We all have a picture of that ideal mom that we want to be and that ideal young adult that we have. We want to see it. Right? That's our ideal up there shining, trying to illuminate the way for us that ideal.

So let's just look at a couple of the things that she posted. She said that life is a struggle. And let's think for a second is that fact or is that a story? And I only place it in a story you have a category because you know it's optional. It's not everyone would look at the situation that we're in the facts of the situation that we're in and come up with the same conclusion the same story we all have different stories.

And so I would put that in the thought category of our s situation out here which is outside of our control. It's our thoughts, our emotions, our actions. And our results.

I mean, what if it were me when I would say words like, "It is the struggle," that would make me feel kind of heavy? Like it's a burden that I'm carrying. And when I'm heavy I don't have a lot of energy. And sometimes I feel depressed when I'm heavy. And the result is that, yeah, it is a struggle.

So I do struggle with doing the things that I want to do in being the person that I want to be so my thought about it has actually created my result there.

Here's another thought. Her 14 year old daughter barely attends school. So the fact is we have a 14 year old daughter. "She barely attends school," is a thought not a fact. Well, we can make it a fact, and that can sometimes be helpful.

So my 14 year old daughter attended school five out of the last 10 days and school days, there's a fact then we can decide how do we want to think about it. She barely goes to school. That's the thought. So there's a fact driving the thought. That's what Sarah shared with us.

Here is the other thought she shared with us. I'm going to label it the story already and that is that, "The mood of the house is dictated by her."

So we may think that that's a fact that she attends school, you know 50% of the opportunities that she has.

She often is upset. She gets down or whatever. Sometimes those can be facts like she exploded yesterday or whatever. Or she was highly agitated yesterday. That can be a fact as most people like, almost the whole world would. If you took a video of that situation, they would agree that she was flailing her arms, yelling or screaming. Those are the facts that we can verify.

 And then our interpretation of that is that the mood of the house is dictated by her.

If I were to think that thought and I have thought that on occasion by members of my you know by what's happening in my family and that actually makes me feel fairly powerless because if I'm just going to react to her, I feel powerless. And I think of all the evidence that's what my brain does is it thinks of all the evidence of how I feel powerless. And so then my mood is dictated by what she does and says.

So that's again that thought shows up in the result that we have in our life. And I want us to see that because once we can see what's happening, we can take our power back and then once we take our power back, we can feel so amazing, about half the time. 

So I don't want to paint a picture that's unrealistic. But the point is that our kids are young adults if they can learn that it's their thinking that's creating their results. Maybe, in my mind, I can then say I have done my job for them because I have taught them the most critical tool that they're going to need for the rest of their lives. And for the times that I won't be there.

CONNECT

So I do want to teach a concept. Now we're going to connect with ourselves and teach you a concept that I recently learned that is so helpful. So we often measure ourselves by that first one by how much we've achieved versus our ideal.

And when we do that, like ideally, I would be the kind of mom who would be able to handle all of this. Whatever's happening in my world, and I would be able to handle it and I would still feel peaceful at the end of the day. I would be the peacemaker in my house. I wouldn't be that calming presence but that would help everyone create a better life for themselves. I would be able to sleep at night without any trouble. I would physically feel strong.

My ideal is up here at the top. You know what I can do is I can see how far away from that ideal I am. That gap. That gap between who I want to be and who I am. And when I focus on that gap. I feel like a failure. I'm frustrated. I often feel disappointed in the way that I show up. I don't have a lot of confidence in myself.

You know if I continually show up in a way that I don't like, I feel guilty because I'm not being the kind of mom that I wanted to be when I started out being a mom. And it can actually cause me to feel depressed. I believe all of this measuring ourselves against our ideal can be the source of most of our sadness. So we are not happy when we are there.

PRACTICE

So how do we teach our kids how to be happy? Here's how they can be happy now. Nothing outside of them has to change in order for them to feel happy. They just have to create their own happiness, by the way that they think. That thought is going to create the emotion of happiness.

And when they're happier, they're going to behave better, and they're going to create the result from that thought that they had that made them happy. So let's look at how do we get back in that's when we visualize how far we have come from where we started.

We have to measure ourselves backwards.

Measuring ourselves against where we started gives us a sense of progress. And that progress in feeling the sense of progress is the key to feeling happiness. We feel successful, satisfied. Confident we have high self confidence. We trust ourselves that we can create the happiness that we want. We enjoy life more and we're optimistic about the future.

So if you want to know how to teach your kids how to feel happy, this is it. In fact, there's so many payoffs to thinking this way and to training ourselves to get more in the practice to get this pattern in our life.

They actually did a research study over 40 years with a group of nuns who they asked them to do some journaling. And from their journals they determine whether or not the nuns tended toward the happy side or tended toward the sad side of life. And what they discovered is the ones who had more happy thoughts lived 10 years longer. 10 years longer.

We can actually create a longer life by focusing on our happiness.

So thank you, Sarah for bringing this topic up because it's so important, and we can figure out how we get ourselves there. And the way that we're going to get ourselves there is totally individual. There isn't a prescription we can follow other than to do the practices that I teach within The Art of Adulting.

To get coached. Because when you get coached, you can see where you got stuck on a thought that created a result that you didn't like. It's hard sometimes to really understand where your thinking is going.

So coaching has made a huge difference in what I do within The Art of Adulting with both the parents and the children.

So this is another way to look at it. It's just on a straight line.

But here's what I want to suggest we do to practice. I want to give our children permission to call us out. So here's what we do.

We teach them this concept. It's so simple, So we have a picture of them in the middle, and then we tell him okay, here's your ideal over here. And then, if we're measuring ourselves against our ideal, we are in the gap.

Instead of doing that, if we focus on where we started, and where we are now, now we're in the game, right? So this concept is pretty simple to teach. The starting point is over here. Here's where we are. And here's the ideal point over here. If we focus on the gap, or be miserable, we focus on the game, we'll be okay.

And there's a systematic way to do this, that I've been teaching now for over two years. That really works with the autistic adults that I work with, and it works for me too. I've been doing it for two years. I cannot wait to share it with you inside The Art of Adulting.

So teach them this concept and then ask them to call you out whenever you are in the gap versus in the gain. And they'll enjoy doing that and you will too and they will get the concept that way.

There are other practices that we can use that I would love to teach you inside The Art of Adulting to help train our brain to really focus on the game instead of the gap.

You know, our brain just has a tendency to look at the negative. We have to train it to look at what has happened that shows we're making progress, the gain.

This all came from a book on this concept of teaching it this way and I love it because it's so simple, but it's so profound came from Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, who together wrote a book called THE GAP AND THE GAIN.

So if you want you can download their book, it's 12 bucks and it  could really change your life. It's very well written. It's really well researched. And he gives you example after example of how this will work for all types of people, especially though I think when we're being self critical.

And I've watched my autistic adults be self critical so often that I think that this is a tool that when they implement this over and over again and catch me doing it, help me practice it over and over again. We're just going to be creating a life that we love together.

So please join me at www.LynnCDavison.com/welcome.

You can learn all about the Art of Adulting. It's just $97 to get started for the first month. You can cancel at any time.

Please join me there. I would love to coach you on this topic and teach you the framework of the four part roadmap to systemize adulting with your autistic adult.

Bye for now.