Coaching with LDS values

Episode 61 God's Plan For Me Welcome to the podcast, loving On Purpose. I'm your host, Bonnie Lyman. If you're having trouble navigating through your relationships with your adult children, if you are struggling to connect with them or having specific challenges, you're in the right place. You are listening to Bonnie Lyman, and this is episode 61. God's plan for me. Hello, all my good friends. I'm so glad to be with you here for another message I'd like to share with you. And I, I'm so excited that there are so many of you sharing my podcasts and listening to it. Maybe one day in one of my newsletters or maybe on this podcast, I'll go through how you can write me a review. I don't need the accolades. In fact, I don't like having a lot of attention put on me, but I know that the more reviews that I get, there's something in the algorithm that it gets sent out or put. In front of a lot more people's faces. And I just have found that, um, this work, this using the model, this looking at things from a different perspective, um, can benefit us all to live a happier life. And of course, as you know, my emphasis is, Uh, being happier in our relationships with our adult children. So today I want to talk a little bit about God's plan for us. , and I'm not gonna get doctrinal, and this isn't doctrine. This is only insights and maybe just a different way of looking at what our responsibility is and what our responsibility. Isn't, but I believe that God has perfect, perfectly orchestrated a plan for each of our lives. And in that plan, there are times that are amazing and wonderful that we wish, and yet I don't think we really wish it that our lives could go on forever. Maybe you're at a family gathering, maybe. You're all in church together. Maybe somebody has forgiven somebody in your family that there was some hard feelings for a long time and it just feels wonderful. But we need those hard times in our lives to help us to grow and to appreciate. The good times, I have had the good fortune, and I can't remember if I told you or not, but I am going into my third week of being in Hawaii because the winners in Spokane get really dreary and my husband and I decided to come over for two weeks. So I had a little incident where I would say God was conspiring in my favor that the landlord were running, um, from V R B O, from that company, but the landlord, there was one day when it was raining and we'd only been here about three days, and he said, sorry for the wintery weather. If you want to extend for a week, I won't charge. Well, it took us two seconds to decide, and when I went to change our flights, we also got a $53 credit. So I have been here in this lovely. Paradise of 75 to 80 degree weather for two and a half weeks. None of my family was able to come out at this time, hopefully next year, but we had some good friends come and they just left. And I have been doing my coaching as I look out over the ocean and sometimes I'm sitting on the back porch in this wonderful weather and we are talking and getting texts from our children at home. That there are six inches of new snow and more snow to come. But it was interesting because I've been here for two and a half weeks in almost perfect weather, and I actually can say, I'm getting close to ready to going home. Of course, I miss seeing my family and I miss seeing my grandkids and like they told us before we went on our mission that we were gonna miss our kids more than our kids missed us. And I think that's true. And it's not because they don't love us or they don't respect us or they don't appreciate us. They just have so much going on in their lives, and so, God orchestrated all of this in our lives to be good times and to be hard times, so that we would appreciate the good times even more, and that we could grow during the hard times. There is a lot of explaining. As to why he planned our lives and custom customized our lives in such a way that's even different than a lot of people we know. And as we know, we get ourselves into a lot of hurt when we start comparing ourselves to other families in other situation. , but he doesn't explain to us. He doesn't really give us any hints. He doesn't give us any heads up on the details of why he planned our life or our lives there to be opposition, because I do think we have control over how we handle our opposition. And who we blame some of our hurt feelings on. There is a choice there, but he doesn't give us much details as to why it was necessary. He does ask us though, to trust him. that if we will turn to him, that he will guide us. Now, maybe there's some of you out there who don't believe in God, and that's okay. That is your right, but I, for myself, find it very comforting to believe that there's this higher power. . There is this person that I refer to as Heavenly Father who will guide me if I ask for guidance and if I'm in a calm and a peaceful enough state that he will guide me. He asks us to try, first of all, to make the best choices. That we can, and I think when he asks us to make these good choices, that he also asks us to step back and wait. No two plans are a. Now we want to think because we had children that were all kind of raised the same way that were related to us, that had some of our dna, that had some of our personality characteristics that they would. Make more choices that were like the choices we were making, but this is where we get into trouble and we get frustrated because no two plans are alike. He has a plan for us and then he has one for our children. So to be the happiest that we can be. And I don't mean we ignore our children, that we don't offer them help when they ask for it or when they're completely drowning, but we need to stay focused on our plan. We don't need to better are children. We need to better ourselves. So we could be asking ourselves, how can I carry out God's plan for me? How can I become the person God knows I can become? And usually that is the same person. That I want to become because I believe I know myself and the next person that knows me the best is God. So our children, because they have their own unique plan, they really know what's best for them. or they think they know and we have to give them credit for, that we can't override because we don't know what journey God had planned for them to go through to learn the things they were supposed to learn in this life. So we may all be striving for the same results, but we probably all have different plans to follow to get those results. So the question becomes, can we just stay focused on our plan? and can we let our adult children, children follow their own customized plan? Can we stay out of God's business and let his plan work out for itself? Self? Can we stay in our own business? Of us learning and growing those things we need to go through that will help us to become the person we're supposed to become. And so then again, Can we stay out of our children's business and allow them to learn and grow in their own unique way? An apostle of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints once told President Irene. Work on being the best you can be and things will work out for you and your family better than you ever could have imagined. Now, I know there's a lot of you that aren't members of my faith, but I do think. That even if you, um, don't choose to follow any faith, that that's pretty comforting, hopeful advice and I really like, I paraphrased it, but I really liked things will work out for you and your family. Better than you ever could imagined. So when I get kind of down about things and when I feel my kids aren't making the right decisions, or when I feel like maybe they're. Leaving me out of their life, not giving me the attention that I want. I know that that is a chance for me to learn maybe how to be more attentive, how to give comfort to somebody that needs comfort more than I do. and then I tell myself if I just work on me of being a respectful, loving, kind person. And that means to everybody, and it's hardest to do that to our own family members. We're so close to these family members and we have such high expectations, and we have this book of instructions of how an adult child should be treating their mother in order. To be considered a good relationship that we get focused on the wrong thing. We just need to focus on, we. Being a better person every day, and like I said, I heard somebody say that in a prayer. God bless those people that need more comfort than what I need. So we work on ourselves. We keep choosing love on purpose. We just love because love, that's what love does. It just loves, even when our children are not doing things that we like, we don't have to love what they're doing. We don't have to give up wanting them to change, but it feels better to choose love. and maybe we need help through. Of course. I feel coaching is an excellent way to get over that hurdle of when we are judging our children. and not loving them when we're getting into God's business of their plan and not just working on our plan. Because coaching works with smart functioning people, not people that have a mental disorder, but we need to decide. Is it worth waiting for? That things will work out better than we ever could have imagined. I don't wanna miss a moment of that, so I am always looking and focusing on the good that's going on in my life. And trying to stay away from focusing on things that I don't like what my kids are doing, but just focusing on the good things that they are doing. Is it worth doing the work to know how to wait and see what God does with those children of his? Here is the how of waiting, and it takes some faith. So if you don't believe in God, you can maybe substitute something else, but number one, you trust God. Number two is you choose love. . But I will also say what's easy to do is also easy not to do. But then we go back to the question, is it worth doing? Is it worth having things work out better than we ever could have imagined? Love is a choice and it's always an option, and I hope that this helps you. I am very good at waiting. I am also really good. At showing people how to use the tools to find peace and love while waiting. Let me help you find relief in the waiting. And how you do that is you start by booking a call with me. You go to bonnie lyman.com and we get on a call. And I give you some help, and then you can decide what's next. What's in it for you is there's a 50% chance you can feel some relief, but if you don't seek help from someone, Then there may be a 0% chance that you can find relief. Things that are hard to do, it's less difficult when we have some guidance, and I would love to guide you. Thank you. Thank you for listening, and I can't wait to meet with you next week. If you like this, be this episode and you felt it was of benefit to you, I ask you to share it with somebody that perhaps it could also benefit. But if you're still feeling kind of stuck in that you don't know how to apply what was talked about, Or where to start on, on changing your thoughts, on changing your perspective, on bettering your relationship. Get on a call with me and we can have a discussion and I can tell you. How to apply it and where we start, and then you get to decide what you want to do about this relationship that maybe you're struggling with with your adult children. There's no reason to go on the rest of our lives struggling with our relationships with our adult children. Let's assume the best. Let's assume that we all love each other and we're just trying to figure out how to maintain our own boundaries and respect another ones. But I can help you with everything. So just go to bonnie lyman.com and book a call. I can't wait to hear from you. .