Bonus Episode: How to Go From Learning to Living Out Peace
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[00:00:00] You are listening to a bonus episode of the Peaceful Mind Podcast. Welcome to the Peaceful Mind Podcast, a place where you can move out of overwhelm and into a calm, confident motherhood with God at the center. I'm Danielle Thienel, certified life coach, Catholic mom, and creator of the Cyclone Mom Method. I help you create emotional steadiness and peace of mind from the inside out so you can experience more balance and more joy in your busy mom life.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, let's get started.
Hello, beautiful mamas, and welcome to the Peaceful Mind podcast. I'm Danielle Thienel, certified life coach for busy Catholic moms, and I am so glad you're here today because this episode is the one I've been waiting for all month to have with you, right? The last four weeks, [00:01:00] I hope you found that I did something special.
I gave you my entire signature book, The Cyclone Mom Method, for free, one part a week right here in your feed. And so you now have access to the whole method start to finish. And if you went through it with me, I want you to hear me say this first. I am so proud of you. You gave your time and attention to something that matters and that is never wasted.
And if you are just finding me this week or even later in the future, I'm thinking if you're new to the podcast, you're brand new, and you didn't hear the series that was given right before this podcast please stay because I built this episode here to stand completely on its own. In fact, what I'm gonna talk about today might be the most important thing that I teach on this podcast all year.
And whether you've heard every [00:02:00] episode, there's been several hundred now or this is your very first one, I'm so glad you are here. Because today, what I wanna talk about is the difference between two kinds of moms. Not the, not good moms, bad moms, like organized mom, messy moms. I'm talking about the difference between women who consume change and moms who actually produce it.
And by the end of our time together, you'll know exactly which side of that line you've been living on and how to cross it should you choose this is something you wanna do. And I'm just gonna be full on to say I didn't know this aspect of myself the consuming versus producing version of myself, and I am [00:03:00] so glad that I learned the difference.
Not so much that I stop being one or start being another, it's just I didn't c- I didn't know. And when you don't have awareness, then you can't choose intentionally. So sometimes I actually choose to be a consumer, and sometimes I am onto myself seeing that the consumption really isn't helping me, and so then I can then shift and intentionally move into being a producer.
And nowadays I'm much more of a producer. But anyways, this might even sound all generic as I'm talking about it, so let's just dig in. Let me just start with describing a version of someone So this person listens to podcasts, which I'm obviously a fan of, right? But listens to it about peace or the things that you want to be more knowledgeable about while you drive.[00:04:00]
And then maybe this person is... has a stack of books, or at least bought the books with the intention of reading it. Maybe some you've read, some you haven't. And there's certain accounts, let's say, on social media that encourage you, and so you follow those. And then you hear something that you like or that's good, so then you save the post with that intention, right?
That, "Oh, I'm going to act on this at some point." Maybe you're someone who this person has frequent my episodes, and you have an... You have a somewhat of an understanding that your thoughts create your feelings. And you have this kind of internal "I really want to stop yelling as much, and I want to start planning out, and I want to let go of my perfectionism," and you definitely are [00:05:00] swirling in your mind the things that you want to change.
Okay? And honestly, this version person knows so much at this point, right? Has been a really good student. Maybe even from listening to what I have to say here, you could feel like you could have a really good conversation with some friends to, to help them out or enlighten them and maybe teach a little class on a subject like I've taught talked about here.
And yet, in this version of a person, it's like regular afternoon. Let's say it's five o'clock. She's... You're in your home, and you look around, and you're like, "This looks exactly the same way it did two years ago. I'm still feeling overwhelmed by life and my motherhood. I'm still snapping more than I want to.
I still [00:06:00] have that lying in bed at night feeling that I'm... should be doing better," right? So as I'm describing this version of a person, I wonder if there was anything that was really relatable to you. Did it sound like you? And if so, it might, you might have this little bit of a sting, but I want you to know two things, right?
This is really how most people are. This was me as well, where I just had all these great ideas and desires to do better and to change. And so first of all, I want you to know nothing is wrong, gone wrong here, and nothing's wrong with you per se if you're somebody who finds themselves being on what I say is the consuming part of [00:07:00] life, right?
Where you are really trying to learn and read. But what's happening it's very understandable, but what's happening is this, is that consuming information, buying the books and even just having it there, or, listening over and over again and having this desire build up for the change But it, it-- what happens is it feels like you are changing by doing that.
Now, you might be a person who knows some new knowledge, but when you listen to an episode, read a chapter, watch a video your brain gives you this genuine sense of progress. It tells you, "I'm working on it." It says, "I'm learning." It says, "I'm getting better." It actually can feel productive. But here's the truth that I'm lovingly handing you today, [00:08:00] that learning about these things, learning about, let's just say, the subject of how to have more peace in your life, and then living out creating peace for yourself, they're actually two different activities.
So for instance, listening to a podcast about patience is not practicing patience at the witching hour of the day. Knowing the tools, hearing about the tools here on the podcast is not using the tools. So you could be the most educated, overwhelmed mom on your street, and your brain loves it that way.
Remember the motivational triad that we talk about here on the podcast. Your lower brain wants you to avoid pain, conserve energy, and [00:09:00] seek pleasure. Consuming is the perfect deal for it. Listening costs you nothing. It risks nothing. There's no failure possible while you're wearing earbuds. No one says no to you.
Nothing gets uncomfortable. Consuming lets you stand at the edge, like edge of the pool, like forever, like desiring to swim, wanting to swim. But standing on the pool is like reading about swimming. You actually jumping in and learning how to swim, doing the strokes, and actually moving yourself in the pool, that's actually swimming.
Nobody ever learned to swim from the deck of a pool So then I want to talk about the other side. What does it mean to be a mom who produces [00:10:00] change instead of what I just described before here, which is the consuming it? So producing, 'cause what we want is we want results in our life, right? We wanna achieve the goals.
We wanna get the project done. And we wanna have the change and the growth that we desire in our heart. And what that is pr- it's actually using the tools or a tool, for the example, in a real moment of your real life. And probably so for instance, I have a whole mom toolbox, and when you're a client of mine, there is a video series in the, in a portal you get access to where I literally truly feel that each of these strategies, of course I call them tools, concepts, that it's like you have a toolbox and they are the ones that [00:11:00] busy, overwhelmed, faith-filled moms who you want to reach into the toolbox and grab it and apply it in your life.
And at first when you learn them and you go to apply it, we're gonna be bad at it, right? It is when you put something in, like your time, your energy, your money your sweat, and you just try. That's you signing up, showing up, producing in something. Again, even if it's a, like you don't do a great job and it's messy, it's you doing the thing even though your brain is gonna list all the reasons for you to wait.
It's gonna tell you, "Oh, just read a little bit more about it. Ask somebody else what else they, you should do. Do some more research. Google it," right? It's you when you make the attempt, when you get something half when you [00:12:00] try again tomorrow, right? This is when you become somebody who's actually living it out, not just learning, but living it out, and that's what I wanna urge you to move more towards.
Now, producing it looks sometimes unimpressive from the outside. It might be you pausing at the kitchen counter for 10 seconds so that you can choose a thought on purpose before you respond to maybe, I don't know, whining kids in the background. It's you doing the goal exercise with an actual pen and paper.
Instead of nodding along to it, listening to it in the car, it's someone who actually, "Oh, what do I need to do? What is suggested to me? Okay, I'm gonna get pen and paper, I'm gonna write it, I'm gonna do the thing." It's you telling your husband, "I'm working on how I handle the things in the [00:13:00] morning," and you say it out loud, where now it's kinda real, right?
And somebody knows, so you might feel accountable there. It's you deciding that this month you will not take one more piece of new information until you've practiced the last thing that you learned Do you see the difference? So another way to maybe clarify it, have you see it is consuming happens in your head.
Producing happens in your kitchen, in your minivan, on your Tuesday afternoon. If we are more leaning on the side of consuming, we collect a ton of knowledge. We do a lot of research. We like to learn. But producing actually creates like an end result, something that you can then evaluate [00:14:00] And having a big pile of results, mama, it's the only place where your actual life gets better, gets change.
Your kids don't experience your knowledge. They experience your 5:00 and how you're showing up. Let me make it even more a little like concrete with the two types of moms kind of explanation. The first mom hears a tool on this podcast, thinks that it's so good, feels genuinely inspired by what I've had to say in 30 minutes, and then moves on to the next episode So maybe six months later, been a long-time listener, and you're-- you've been inspired the whole way.
You're like, "That is good stuff." But you find yourself and look around, you feel like [00:15:00] unchanged, or you still don't have the change that you wanted or the goals that you wanted six months ago. Now, there's another mom who hears the same tool, and that afternoon... I know a lot of times at the end of this episode, I will say, "Just do this one thing.
Pick one thing and do this week," right? But she just takes that same afternoon of hearing it, in one single moment with one single kid, she actually tries it. And let's say it goes maybe about 60% well. But the next day, she tries it again, and that time, something in her shifts because now she's not a woman who just heard the idea.
She's a woman with actual evidence of what putting it into the practice in her own real life gave her a result to see. It was the same podcast, the same tool, the same busy life, but the only difference between these two is that one of them made an attempt. One of them put it into [00:16:00] action.
That's it. That's the entire line between them, and I'm speaking from somebody who this is how it happened for me, right? I literally learned this whole new way to work with my mind and about what was going on with my emotions and really what the cause and the root cause, and then I was given these specific tools and strategies to try.
And they-- some of them, I was like, "I don't really get this. I don't really buy this," or, but I was so desperate for change, having tried all the things I thought would work and got nowhere, that I literally started putting it into practice. For instance, as a perfectionist, and my coach saw this and offered me the tool of B minus, start to do my activities where I would do them in such a way that I would give myself a grade of a B minus instead of an A.
And then at the end of that first day when I was using it, I literally was like, "Look at all the things I [00:17:00] got done." And even though they weren't perfect, I'm just like, it was still feels good. It was still better than nothing, or nobody came around and said, "Oh, that was just a B-minus job of laundry, mom." So I was like yeah, that worked."
And then the next day, you're trying it again until I'm, like, experiencing this is way better Now, I wanna be fair to you here, right? Because I can hear some of you saying, "But Danielle, learning matters." Of course it does, and of course I consume. I read books. I wrote books. I have books.
I want you to read those books. And I love me a good podcast. I listen to tons of them. Yes, learning matters. It absolutely does. But what I want you to see is learning is the on-ramp. Okay? It's the on-ramp, right? I have spent 345 episodes previous to this handing you things worth learning, [00:18:00] and I also just spent a month giving you my whole book because I believe in that content so much.
But an on-ramp is only useful if you take it onto the highway, right? Information was never meant to be your destination. It was meant to be the fuel And so we wanna say so producing is where the results are, why do we stay stuck in our lives consuming a lot and not really taking what we want and actually getting moving on it?
And there's three reasons I wanna bring up for that. First, consuming is safe. The moment you actually try, you can actually fail. You can use the tool and still yell. You can set the goal, you can still miss it. Your lower brain would rather keep you researching forever than let you risk failure. So [00:19:00] it will whisper you the great lie, which is, "I just need a little bit more information first.
One more book, one more episode, then I'll be ready." And doesn't that lie sound so responsible? But watch what it actually does in your week. You finish the episode about the morning routine and how to have a better morning routine, or I know I have an episode on that. But instead of setting the alarm 10 minutes earlier the next day, you actually go and find another episode about morning routines to see what they have to say.
The lie has you preparing for a life you could already be living right now. So feeling ready for change, it's not coming, right? Ready, you feel ready by being in action and creating by doing things, not before. So the second reason why we [00:20:00] stay in that safe place is consuming is free, and I don't just mean money.
It costs no discomfort. Producing has a price, okay? It costs the awkwardness of doing something new really badly. It costs energy on days you're tired. Sometimes it does cost money, like when I invested in my own coaching, my coach certifications as a mom of three young kids when my brain gave me every reason not to spend that on myself, right?
Producing always has a price, your energy, time, money. But guess what? So does staying the same. So does not doing anything. It literally does take of our energy, our time You're paying that one right now [00:21:00] in overwhelm. If you're a mom in overwhelm there's a cost to that every single day So really there's no free option.
There's it's only choosing which price we're gonna pay: time, energy, money. And the third reason why we stay on the consuming side, and this is a sneaky one, is consuming lets us feel close to our goals and dreams without ever testing it, right? This is the one where it like it, it tell- tricks us to say that we are, quote, "doing something about it."
As long as the peaceful version of you stays in your head, in your imagination, she stays like perfect, right? When we try to make it real is messier. I see this playing out right now with a trip that we are looking to take in a couple months, and we have just been consuming.
Again, [00:22:00] nothing wrong with that. You've gotta learn and plan and decide where you wanna go and look what needs tickets and what are the prices of things and all of that. But what I know is it's not until we make a decision or when we buy the airplane tickets or when we, start booking the tickets for things like that, that we will then be in producing mode.
We will then have a result. So how do you cross this line if you're someone who is listening to this and has realized that you are someone who does way more consuming than producing? I want you to shift from listening to living. So if we don't... If we wanna talk in more terms that really I think can clarify and help us, instead of consuming, listening, we want to actually produce results.
We wanna just be living our lives. [00:23:00] And so how do you cross over there? You don't need to overhaul everything. I just want you to follow my 10% philosophy. You just wanna make a few small producing moods. Moves. Producing moods could work, too but producing moves. And here's... Here they are. First, I want you to adopt what I will call the one-to-one rule, and that is every time you consume something, you apply one thing.
Like you listen to this episode, then before you play the next one, you owe your real life one deliberate practice of something you heard. One. The single rule will change more in your home than maybe 100 hours of listening Second, pick one tool. And that one may literally be the decision that I am going to either stop consuming something right [00:24:00] now and getting into action on something that I've been putting off.
That could be your one-to-one. Second, I want you to pick one tool and give it one week. If you have gone through the method series of the book this month, you know that there's a whole toolbox that I've offered. Calling on your faith, clarifying your goals, connecting with yourself, confidently being mom, taking control of your time, processing your feelings.
I've talked about different tools in there, different strategies. Don't try to live them all out by Friday, but just pick one that tugged at you most and practice it. Practice it imperfectly, but in one real moment each day for seven days, and here's what that could look like. Say you are picking to call on your faith.
That's the first step of the Cyclone Mom method. Then this week, every time that swirl starts, before you problem solve anything, you're gonna pause, you're gonna take one breath, and you're gonna [00:25:00] hand the moment to God first. That's the whole practice. Seven days. Maybe B-minus that I mention, right? B-minus, you might want to start doing your activities or your to-do list, and when you've done it in a fashion that you would give yourself a seventy to eighty percent, like that would give me a B-minus, then you stop, and then you get to the next item And then third, another way to put this into practice is to change like that scoreboard, right?
Consumers measure how much they know. Producers measure how many times they tried. So this week, don't ask yourself, "Do I understand this yet?" Ask, "How many attempts did I make today on this?" Three clumsy attempts beat a perfect understanding every time. And by the way, this is exactly how God grows us too.
He doesn't ask us to [00:26:00] have the whole of our faith figured out before we live it. Faith has always been something we practice one small step at a time, right? Long before we feel sure. And your peace works in the same way. And fourth, I wanna point out to put a little skin in the game. Tell someone what you're working on.
Write it where you see it. Producers let it cost them something because the cost is what makes us show up. If all you do is take those four moves and run with them, this episode will have been worth your time, and you will be different in a month. That. And you don't need anything else from me to do it.
And let me say that once more so it sticks, okay? One thing applied, action, a result [00:27:00] produces a result for every one thing consumed. Maybe you use one tool a week, one real moments in your day, and count your attempts, not your knowledge. Just put a little skin in the game. This means put time into it, your energy into it, and money.
Believe me when you pay for something, you are more likely to show up about it And this is how someone moves from being a listener to becoming like a liver outer, a l- like living this out in your life. And that is how moms who, for instance, consumed my book, again, good stuff. I'm glad you did.
But can you move to the producer, putting the strategies and concepts [00:28:00] into practice in your own life, ones that would actually produce a result that you can see? And I think I mentioned this a little earlier, but I just wanna close by telling you, again, my own line crossing, because I do see that once I was playing it safe and doing a lot of the consuming too.
When coaching found me, because I was listening to a podcast, I could have stayed the listener. I remember hearing her offer her group program and then the... eventually the certification school. I could have kept nodding along and agreeing and learning and collecting insights and being inspired by it, and my life would have stayed where I was at that point in my motherhood totally overwhelmed and not enjoying it like I had hoped.
Instead, I did the producer thing. I [00:29:00] signed up. I put in money, time, energy, and the sweat equity. I got coached. I practiced the tools in my actual life, and I did it messily, and I failed at plenty of them, but I kept going. And that is the only reason that today I'm not a mom who just knows the Cyclone Mom method, but I'm a mom who lives it.
The calm I teach you all, the peace of mind I teach is the calm and the peace of mind I walk around in, and it was produced. That is what I want for you, not to be the mom who just dreams about becoming peaceful or has more connection in her relationships or goes for that side business that she's been dreaming of or to stop yelling or to use her time in a way that feels better to her, [00:30:00] right?
I want you to become her And here's where I'll be honest with you about what coaching actually is, because people misunderstand it, right? Coaching is not more consuming. It's not me giving you extra information. Coaching is the structure where you finally apply everything you're hearing on this podcast.
It's you, it's your real life, it's your specific swirl, and having a coach in your corner every week, making sure the tools are actually leaving your toolbox. It's the single most producer move I know, which is exactly why it changed my life and why it changes my clients' lives. So if something in you is saying it's time, then the one step, the action that you could produce is book a free coaching consultation with me, okay?
You fill out a short questionnaire before we meet, and that action of e- [00:31:00] even filling out the questionnaire produces results for you, and I think is very helpful. And then when we meet on the call, we'll talk about it, what's really going on in your life, maybe what you want to happen instead or where you wanna change, what areas you wanna change, and whether working together is the right fit for you and me.
No pressure, right? It's an honest conversation and a clear decision, and you will be a producer if you schedule the call, create the call, right? It is just in itself a producer act. It's the difference between listening to me to one more episode about change and doing one real thing towards possible change for yourself.
The link to schedule that call is in the show notes, or you can go to daniellethienel.com. It's there on my website. But either way, mama, whether you... we meet on a call or you take the four moves that I've laid out in this episode and run with it, do me one favor. Don't [00:32:00] let this be one more episode you consume.
Let it be the one where you start producing. Okay, everyone. That is what I have for you this week, my beautiful mamas. Until next time, may peace be with you always. Thank you for listening to the Peaceful Mind podcast. If you've been feeling a quiet desire for more peace and steadiness in your motherhood, I invite you to take the next step of scheduling a free coaching consultation with me.
We'll meet over Zoom to explore options and possibilities of how having a personal life coach and mentor could help you experience the exact motherhood and life your heart desires. To talk through current options, schedule a free coaching consultation today. You'll find the link to schedule in the show notes.
It would be an honor to support you at any stage of your motherhood journey.
