Podcast MDM Academy Conference

EP 174 Why Am I Struggling?

If you've been trying your heart out to be the very best mom or wife or steward of your health, and you're not making much progress, please stop beating yourself up. It really may not be an effort issue.

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 AI-GENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Episode 174: Why Am I Struggling?

Audrey: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Audrey Rindlisbacher, author of The Mission Driven Life and founder of The Mission Driven Mom. Recently, I've been thinking a lot about questions that women and mothers ask me a lot. They're questions that I've really grappled with, and I want to tackle some of those questions in the weeks to come. Things like: Why am I struggling so hard, and things don't seem to be getting better? Or, how do I trust myself more? Or, what if I do everything right and things still don't get better, or they don't go the way I want them to?

These are important questions. These are hard questions. And I want to dive into that first question today and talk for a minute about why we can put in so much effort and struggle so much and work so hard, and things still don't seem to get better. Why doesn't that effort yield more fruit?

So if you've ever experienced this, I want you to think about an area in your life where you struggle quite a bit, or where you feel like you've put in a lot of effort. Maybe it's in your marriage, in your parenting, in your health. Maybe you've consumed books or talked to experts or gone to therapy or taken courses, tried different practices or ideas that you found out there, and you just feel like things really aren't that much better.

I want to pose a question to you, or an idea. What if you really don't need more effort? You're already doing it. You're already trying so hard. What if you actually need to learn something that you don't already know? What if you need to change the way that you think about this thing?

Blaine and the Viola

Audrey: I'm going to tell you a story that will really exemplify what I'm talking about here. My husband has a dad who was very into music. His family was into music. They had a family band growing up. His dad, my father-in-law, played multiple instruments. And so it was very natural in his family that when they were, you know, in elementary school or so, Dad would put each of them on an instrument. And for whatever reason, my father-in-law chose viola for Blaine. He said, "I think you would be great at viola. I think that's the perfect instrument for you." And somewhere in elementary or middle school, he handed him the viola. I think they had a couple of little introductory lessons, and that was pretty much it.

Now, high school rolls around. He's played the viola a tiny bit. He's watched his dad play string instruments. He has a couple of books, and he decides he wants to get better at it. He really likes playing his viola. So he signs up for orchestra at school, but his dad won't pay for any lessons, and he doesn't have any money for lessons. So he's in the school orchestra. It's pretty small. He gets in daily practice because he's there at orchestra. He follows along. He does the best he can. He's not great at counting. He's struggling to keep up.

But sometime in that school year, the orchestra teacher told all the kids that there was an all-state orchestra they could attend if they so desired. And for Blaine specifically, the teacher said, "Well, I think they have the orchestra pretty much full, but they might be able to make room for another viola. You could go check it out."

So Blaine decided to go. There's something about being in the music, being in the sound, sitting amongst all of the other players and playing beautiful pieces, that is very meaningful for Blaine. It's very nutritive. He really, really, really loves it. He'd already kind of had a taste of that from high school orchestra. So he signs up, he goes to this all-state orchestra, and they put him last chair, but he doesn't care because he just wants to play. And he picks up his viola and they play some Beethoven piece. I can't remember which one it was.

And he said a few notes in, he was hooked. It was a really large all-state orchestra, and they let him sit in last chair. He fumbled along. He did the best he could, but it gave him a taste, and he really, really wanted it.

So that summer he decided, "Okay, well, I can't have lessons, and I've learned some this year in school. So I'm just going to practice three hours a day." This is some serious dedication and a high level of effort. So he's practicing virtually every day for three hours. He promises me it was really that long. He's doing the best he can. He sees maybe a little bit of improvement. I don't know. Not much.

He goes back to high school orchestra. He stays in the all-state orchestra, close to the end of the chairs. Never really had lessons. He went to college and wanted to play viola in college. And for the first time in his life, he got a really good teacher. It was a university professor at a big, huge university. And here was his big chance. In order to be in the music program, he had to have these private lessons. And so for a year at college, he had these private lessons with this professor and made very moderate improvement. Really not a lot.

Well, time goes by. [He's dating as well?] He's doing his college studies. He's kind of disenchanted because by this point, it's been four or five or six years of viola in his mind. He has finally had high-level lessons, and he just isn't very good. And it's dissatisfying, and he has other priorities. And then we marry, and then we have children, and he sets it aside. We carried this viola around with us for the next, you know, 20-plus years. He'd pick it up every now and again, play a little bit of a piece that he used to play, talk about it, dream about someday when he'd play viola again, but he never really did much about it.

The Best of the Best

Audrey: Well, a few years ago, he had more free time, and he decided, "I'm going to pick the viola back up. I want to do it right this time. So I'm going to get a really great teacher." So he starts asking around. We're north of Dallas, in Plano. It's a large city. And most of the biggest cities around us all have a city orchestra. There's Richardson, there's Plano, there's Frisco, I think there's McKinney, and there's the actual Dallas Symphony. There are all these symphonies around, and so there are viola players. And he started asking around among all of them, and he had a teacher that was highly recommended to him.

She had all the credentials and an impressive history. Very highly recommended. She played in a couple of these city orchestras. And so she was the best of the best, right? She was going to be the best teacher he ever had.

Well, pretty quickly, she jumps him into a pretty difficult piece. She tells him she wants him to compete in this local competition where you play in front of judges and you get a score. So he's playing his heart out. He's working, working, working, trying to get this piece together. He goes, and he does kind of a moderate job. Months go by, and he's trying really hard. He practices his heart out. I mean, he's practicing for about two hours a day and going to these lessons with this teacher. And after several months had gone by, he's having these conversations with me about, "This is still so hard, and I don't know if I'm improving, and I don't feel like I'm getting much better."

Eventually he finds this volunteer orchestra. It's just a small volunteer orchestra, but he loves playing with them. He signs up and starts going.

And with this teacher, month after month, for well over a year, I think about a year and a half, he'll practice for about two hours a day, and he'll show up, and she'll say, "Did you even practice? Why aren't you doing this better?" She would compliment him some, but sometimes she was hard on him. But she had this incredible reputation, and everybody thought highly of her. And so for a long time, he just kept telling himself:

"Well, it can't be her, because she's the best of the best, and she's the best teacher I've ever had. And everybody told me she was awesome. And I'm working my butt off. I'm trying so hard, and it's just not coming together. What in the world am I going to do?"

Finding the Right Teacher

Audrey: And I'm listening to all of this, and I was encouraging him to look around for perhaps another teacher. Well, fast forward. He eventually finds two more teachers. He calls around to basically all of the violists in every symphony that he can find within driving distance. He asks people, "Who else do you know that teaches viola?" He gets the names of some other people that are highly recommended. He hires two other teachers while he keeps his old teacher. He tries out these new teachers. They're both significantly better than his current teacher. But one rises to the top, and he starts making progress quickly. Every week he's doing significantly better. And every week he comes home with, "Did you know there's a principle for how to hold the bow? Did you know there's a principle, or a fundamental, or a tactic, or a basic for this, that, or the other?"

And this probably won't come as a surprise to you, but one of the things that this teacher said almost at the very beginning was:

"You don't have the fundamentals down. You don't understand the basics. You're not playing viola in accordance with the principles that govern playing well. And so I have a trick or a strategy for all of these things, and we are just going to try things, and you're going to practice the fundamentals."

He still has the volunteer orchestra, so he still has to practice the pieces for it. But rather than doing these harder pieces and practicing pieces all the time, now he's coming home doing a jillion scales and different bowing exercises. He's supposed to hold a pen and do a certain thing, and move his arm a certain way, and hold the bow a certain way, and do these certain activities.

And now we're, I don't know, several months into this with her, maybe a year. I can't remember. Anyway, he is her favorite student, and she makes exceptions for him all the time. When she's not giving lessons that week or she's going out of town, she'll slip in a lesson with him here and there, because he's so dedicated and so hardworking.

And you know that effort piece we started this podcast with? He is willing to put in the effort. He's willing to do whatever it takes. He's willing to put in the two hours a day. I was with him at a wedding recently, and he kept doing these little pen exercises. I said, "I need you to stop. That is so distracting. I just want to enjoy the wedding." Because he's so devoted to being the best player he can be.

It was not a matter of effort. Think about it. He doesn't have any lessons. He puts in all kinds of effort, all summer long, three hours a day, no progress. He finally signs up for lessons years later. He has one of these really great college professors. Almost no progress. Later on, he finds another teacher. Almost no progress. And then he finds the teacher. And now he's soaring. He's learning so quickly and becoming better. His intonation... I don't even know all the right words to explain to you all the ways in which he's better. But he's really thriving, really excited. He and this teacher are on fire. Not because he needed more effort, but because he needed the right education. He needed to return to fundamentals.

When Effort Makes It Worse

Audrey: So that's why, if you're putting in all this effort and you're trying your heart out to be the very best mom or the very best wife or the very best steward of your health or whatever, and you are not making a lot of progress, I feel pretty confident telling you it really may not be an effort issue. Because unless you're pointed in the right direction, unless you have the right foundation, unless you're working from fundamentals, the effort won't help.

In fact, sometimes it hurts you. In Blaine's case, that was definitely what happened. He drilled really bad habits into himself, and this teacher, focusing on fundamentals, has had to undo the bad stuff while teaching the right stuff. Sometimes you can even get further behind by putting in more effort with the wrong beliefs, the wrong attitudes, without the fundamentals, without the principles. You may be making things worse, just doubling down with effort instead of slowing down and discerning what's true about your situation.

It reminds me of a mom I know who was recently learning more about her situation. She has a bunch of kids, and over a decade ago, she got really devoted to some different methodologies, and she kind of doubled down. And now here we are all these years later, and she's been struggling with depression and overwhelm for about the last year, and she finally had to admit to herself it's because her children are unruly and disrespectful. And a big part of that is because she leaned into these applications that these people were giving her without really understanding them, without really having the foundation, without really knowing the fundamentals. And she put in all the effort. She showed up day by day. She was trying to be a really great mom. And no amount of more effort really made the difference, because when you aren't living the principles, when you don't have the proper foundation, it doesn't matter how hard you try.

One of my kids started running, and she had never run before, and I didn't understand, because I wasn't a runner, how important shoes were. We didn't have the right shoes on her, and she got on this track team, and sure enough, within just a few months, she had stress fractures, because we didn't understand the fundamentals. The teacher didn't give us the fundamentals. They didn't teach us how to buy the right shoes and how to stretch the right way and how to keep her body in good shape. And without those fundamentals, she drilled in bad habits. She put in all this effort. She ran every day. She loved being on that team. And yet it kind of caved, because we didn't have the right foundation from which to build.

So it really does make all the difference. You have to be pointed in the right direction. You have to have those fundamentals, not more effort.

So let's think for just a minute. Let's compare Blaine's experience to this mom's experience. They both cared deeply about what they were doing. They both genuinely wanted to be successful. They both looked around and tried to find the best resources they could. And they both put in all sorts of effort, and they were willing to be there for the long haul and keep trying and being patient and working hard. And yet without the fundamentals, it just didn't work. Intention isn't enough, and effort is definitely not enough.

What Do I Know to Be True?

Audrey: So this week, I want you to try something. I want you to think about an area in your life where you feel like you're really putting in a lot of effort, or you have put in a lot of effort, and it's just not improving, and you're frustrated. I want you to slow down. I want you to think deeply about whatever this is, whether it's a relationship or your health or even just a dirty room. And then I want you to ask yourself:

"What do I know to be true about this, about me, about them, in this situation?"

And I want you to try to rebuild on what you know to be true. Maybe there's one truth, maybe there are multiple truths. And then I want you to start thinking about, "Okay, I know that this is true, so how can I build on that? How can I practice that truth? How can I do more of that thing that I know to be right?" And start to try to build a more solid foundation in this area of your life, because it really does make all the difference.

Where Was the Training for This?

Audrey: You should stop beating yourself up if things aren't working out the way you want them to, and start asking yourself, "Is there maybe something that I wasn't taught, that I wasn't given, that I don't have?" Because I really believe that a lot of us, a lot of moms, are suffering unnecessarily because we weren't given what we need to thrive as women and as mothers.

I mean, think about the complicated situations you find yourself in all the time: negotiating relationships between other people, managing and juggling schedules, building a relationship with your spouse while also trying to be a great mom. Often you're also working in some capacity and trying to manage the finances and the home. And where was the training for this? When were we taught the truths around it? When did we get a chance to practice success? We weren't given what we need. You probably weren't given what you need to succeed in this area.

So stop beating yourself up. Start slowing down and thinking more deeply. Maybe journal about this. What do you know to be true? And try rebuilding on that solid foundation.

Coming Up Next

Audrey: Next time, we're going to build on this by asking the next logical question. Once we know, or think we know, what might be true about something, how can we trust ourselves to make those judgments? Once we've thought things through and it's time to actually act and make that decision, how can we better trust ourselves to judge and discern better decisions based on what we now know to be more true? We'll talk about that next time.

Thank you so much for joining me. I would love for you to share with me in the comments your takeaway and your practice on this. How did it go, slowing down and discerning what's true so that you can build on a better foundation? I will see you next time.