If you’re anything like me, you sometimes find yourself feeling grumpy, discontent or dissatisfied. And you’d rather be feeling joy, hope, trust or safety. Today, I’m sharing my step-by-step process for how to shift any mood. 

You’ll Learn:

• My step-by-step process to shift any mood
• Why we tend to slip into negative moods
• How your thoughts help create the feelings you want
• When to use this mood shifting practice

Whether you’re gearing up for a beach day, a long drive or a visit with your in-laws, I’m going to teach you how to feel the way you want to feel during that experience.

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How To Shift Any Mood

First, it’s important to understand that your brain is like a muscle. Whenever you have a thought or an emotion that gets repeated in your brain, a neural pathway is formed and reinforced. 

Maybe you’ve gotten into a pattern of looking for problems or feeling discontent. By using more intentional thinking, we can reroute those pathways. 

As Robin Sharma says, “What you focus on grows, what you think about expands, and what you dwell upon determines your destiny.”

Decide what mood you want to be in. Ask yourself, “How do I want to feel during this experience?” 

Define the feeling. Go a little deeper into what the feeling that you’re chasing really means. For example, if you want to be present, what does being present look like? If you want to feel joyful, calm, grateful or trusting, what does that mean to you? By focusing on the feeling and defining what it actually looks like and feels like in your body, you’ll be more able to experience it. 

Identify obstacles. What might come up that would prevent you from feeling the way you want to feel? Your brain will probably come up with these pretty naturally. It will tell you that you can’t feel joy, belonging or ease for all kinds of reasons. Now, challenge those obstacles by soothing and reassuring yourself against that fear. If you want to be present, but you’re worried about the future, remind yourself that you don’t need to worry because you’ve overcome a lot of obstacles in the past. 

Be intentional with your thoughts. Ask, “What thoughts help me feel the feeling I want?” List them out and choose a couple that feel good to you. You’ll use them a bit like a mantra. This is intentional thinking, and it’s how you stay in the feeling that you want and shift back into it. 

Reinforce the new thoughts. Chasing a feeling often feels like exactly that - it's not easy to catch. It's right in front of you, and when you grab it, it pulls away again. Your brain is resisting this new neural pathway, so it takes work to keep getting back to the feeling you want. When you notice yourself slipping into more negative feelings (getting grumpy, short-tempered, etc.), use your intentional thoughts to bring yourself back. 

You can use this process at any time (I love it as a daily practice), but there are a few situations when I find it especially helpful:

• Before a vacation
• Before visiting family or in-laws
• Before holidays
• When you’re struggling with how you feel in your body

I invite you to do this practice and decide, on purpose, how you want to feel this summer. Chase the feeling, be intentional with your thoughts and shift any mood. 

Free Resources:

Get the free Summer Toolkit

Get your copy of the Stop Yelling Cheat Sheet!

In this free guide you’ll discover:

✨ A simple tool to stop yelling once you’ve started (This one thing will get you calm.)

✨ 40 things to do instead of yelling. (You only need to pick one!)

✨ Exactly why you yell. (And how to stop yourself from starting.)

✨A script to say to your kids when you yell. (So they don't follow you around!)

Download the Stop Yelling Cheat Sheet here

Connect With Darlynn: 

• Book a complimentary session with Darlynn
• Learn about the different parenting programs at www.calmmamacoaching.com
• Follow me on Instagram @darlynnchildress for daily tips 
• Rate and review the podcast on Itunes

Welcome back to Become a calm mama. I am your host. I'm Darlynn

Childress, and I'm a life and parenting coach and the

host of this podcast. And today on the pod,

I am introducing you to a process, an actual,

like, step by step process of how to shift any mood.

And I am bringing this up because I

love to do this exercise before the summer, and

I include it in the summer tool kit, which is my

free guide for planning a stress free summer with kids.

And you can get the summer toolkit on my website

which is calm a,

and it's spelled mama. So calm

a resources. Click on that, and you'll get the toolkit.

So the reason why this is important to me is because I

find myself grumpy. I find myself

a, not now as much Become I've been practicing this for so long, but I

it's very easy for me to slip into some

discontentment, some feelings of dissatisfaction.

And the reason these feelings come up for me is because I have a

very old old pattern of protecting

myself from getting hurt. And what that

pattern did is it created like a hyper a within me so

that I was always sort of scanning the environment to figure

out what is going wrong. And then I would

do, like, hyper productivity and hyper a and hyper perfectionism

to try to a whatever problems

that I saw in order to protect myself. It's a very old pattern of

mine. You probably relate, because, you

know, I don't know. I feel like we're similar. But

anyway, I don't wanna live my life in

discontent. Right? I would rather look for solutions or not

even see problems at all. I'd rather just feel the way I want to

feel in my life, which is a,

joy, hope, trust, safety, all these

beautiful emotions. And so I developed a process for

myself that I go through step by step in order to shift

my mood. And it starts by being intentional

about the mood I want to be in. So

this might seem really weird to you at first glance

Become I'm gonna teach you how to intentionally feel

something to feel on a. And

that requires that you pre decide how do I

wanna feel while I a that thing that I'm gonna

experience, that summer day, that beach day, that

long car drive, that, you know, visit with your in laws,

you know, whatever current circumstance that you have in your

life, I am gonna teach you how to feel

the way you wanna feel a you predecide on

purpose how you wanna feel during that thing.

So why do we do this? And it's

really to change our brain, to change

our neural pathway. Because whenever you have a

thought or an emotion that gets

repeated in your brain, a neural pathway

is formed and reinforced. So your your

brain, it's like a muscle and when we have the same thought over and over

and over, the thought or the a pathway becomes stronger.

So that is me. Right? Like, looking for where the

problems are, finding the problems, feeling discontent,

and then going into solution mode in order to not feel discontent.

But my brain taught me that I needed to be looking for problems

in order to keep myself safe, and I don't want that.

Right? So instead, what I wanna teach you is

how to focus on what you wanna focus on

to, you know, that's what mindset really is. It's intentional

thinking. A I love intentional thinking, but

I'm actually talking about intentional feeling

using thinking. So we

know, like, there's this famous quote, what you focus on grows,

what you think about expands, and what you dwell upon determines your

destiny. This is a Robin Sharma quote. And so

I wanna help you learn to a to focus on a we're going to be

doing that by chasing feelings.

So I'm gonna actually take you through a process that I did this morning to

be honest because, like I said, this is a real

practice for me. So this morning, I was sitting

down and doing some, you know, emotional

coaching myself and some journaling because this week,

my youngest child graduates from high school. So this episode that

you're listening to comes out on Thursday in June of

2024, and I'm recording this on Monday thinking about my

son's graduation that's happening in just a couple of days.

And I woke up really wanting to

create an intentional feeling and an intentional

experience for myself as I go through this week

and as I go through this experience of watching him graduate from high school.

Alright. So what I did was I sat down and I asked myself a

first question that I always start with is how do I want to feel?

So for this journal prompt, I said said, how do I wanna feel during graduation

day? So we have it's not it's at 9 Calm, and

so we have to, you know, have a kind of a quick morning. And then

we have a little open house lunch, and then we have some other

family coming, and then we're going to a dinner. So it's kind of a full

day, and there's a lot of different people coming and moving parts and

things like that. So I was like, well, okay. How do I wanna feel? Because

I could feel busy. Right? I could feel sort of like doo doo

doo planner and telling everybody what's going on. And I really didn't wanna feel

that. I wanted to feel present. That's what I decided. I was like, I just

wanna be present in

this day and in this moment in my life and in my son's

life. So the next question I ask myself is, like, what does

being present mean? So think about maybe some

feelings that you have that you were chasing in your life.

Like, really start to think about an event, a trip you're taking,

or, you know, a the summer itself or,

a, like, you know, a beach day or something small. A.

You can do a big like, how do I a feel about my marriage? Or

how do I wanna feel about my job? Or how do I wanna feel about

being a mom? You can do it really big or you can do it really

small. Like, how do I wanna feel about this dinner? Right? Like, right now with

these people throwing chicken nuggets. So you can kinda do this in

any scope a you pick a feeling. And a lot of the

feelings are, you know, joy, happiness,

calm, content, grateful,

relief, pride, trust,

safe. That's a big one for me. I often will decide that I wanna feel

safe at a, which goes along for me with belonging. So

I wanna feel like I belong. I want to feel

curious or I wanna feel delight. So really sit and think about

an event or something in your life that's upcoming or

that's going on. Just ask yourself, okay, how do I wanna

feel? So I picked

a, and then I forced myself or I challenged myself

to define what does presence mean to

me? What does being present mean to me?

And I wrote down being present is

not being in the past or in the future.

And that when I wrote that, I realized

that it would be very easy for me to go into the past.

And so I had to write, I want to be content

about the past. I wanna be at peace with the decisions

I made as a parent and be okay with the path Sawyer has

taken to get to this point in his life. What would drag me

away from the present moment of being here now with him is

if I was thinking about how it could have been better.

Like, that the past like, I messed up somewhere along the line,

and this moment isn't that great because it's something I did in the

past. And I didn't wanna bring that energy

to the present moment. I wanted to let go of the past.

And so I needed to be, you know, be at peace a I

work through that a little bit. Like, I am okay

with the decisions I've made as a parent and where Sawyer is because

we're here now, and I'm grateful for being here now. I like

that he's graduating from high school. I like the person he's

becoming. I like the journey he's taken. And I also, like,

I just feel okay about it. But that's a decision.

I don't have evidence that I did it all right or

anything. I just know that I did my best,

and I am like, okay. This is what I did. And it's enough, and it's

good, and it's fine. And that means I don't have to bring regret

or blame or pain into the present moment. Now,

the other part of being present is not being in the

future. So then I needed to, you know, find

some peace about the future and I wanted to so I'm like, I wanna feel

ease about Sawyer's college path and his adulthood. I don't

want to worry. I don't wanna feel the need to control or hyper plan

or, you know, sell his future to anybody. Like, I just

wanna feel like, nope. This is his plan. This is what he's doing.

He's going to Santa Barbara next year and living in a dorm

and going to community college. That's what he's doing, and we're thrilled about it.

Santa Barbara is not too far from our house, but far enough that he's moving

a. And we're just happy, right, for him.

And so I wanna step into the future with trust.

Now, how do I do that? How do I get out of any sort of

anxiety about the future so that I can be in the present

moment? And I do that by reminding this is how I do

it. I do it by reminding myself of other hard things

that I have overcome or that he has overcome. And that

helps me feel more ease because I'm reminding myself that he

and I are both strong, we're capable, we have a good a, and I

can look at my past self and be like, oh, well, we

overcame a bunch of hard things a now we're here.

So whatever hard things come in the future, we probably could handle those

too. So now as I have been

working through my past feelings and and fears and anger

and my future feelings and fears and

worries, then I'm starting to settle in to feeling

present. And I'm like, okay, what does being present mean

to me? So that's the question. What does joy mean to

you? What does happiness mean to you? And define

it for yourself Become you can chase a feeling by saying

joy. But unless you've given yourself some time to really

grow that feeling of joy or, or expanding it and focusing

on it, defining it, figuring out what it actually looks like and feels

like in your body, it's going to be hard for you to

have that embodied experience when you are in

that place, like at graduation.

So this is what I think about when I'm going to be present

at graduation. I wanna pay attention to the little things. I wanna look at the

weather, the colors, the crowds. I wanna

really hear the kind things that are being said,

take in the congratulations both to him and to Kevin and

I. I wanna feel the hugs of the people around

me who care about my journey as a parent and

this kid that I love. And I I don't wanna

worry about time or the experience of others. I don't wanna be stuck in

a people pleasing pattern. I wanna just be in my own body

and thinking about my experience and then being present and being a witness

for Sawyer. That's it. That's what I want.

That's the that I'm chasing. Now notice I've spent, you

know, like 5 minutes, 7 minutes defining

what I wanna feel and really like what were the what are the obstacles that

might come up to prevent me from feeling that feeling? So

you could do that with joy. You could do that with delight. You could do

that with belonging. And what's interesting

is that a when you say I wanna feel joy, your

brain might start to come up with some reasons why you're not gonna be able

to. That happens really, you know,

naturally. It's like your brain's like, uh-uh, you can't feel joy because your

sister's not here or you can't feel joy because your parents,

you know, are not talking to you or something like that.

Right? You can't feel joy because you're in a divorce and you don't really

like your kid's dad or mom.

So you might come up with some obstacles and that

when you're trying to define that feeling and make it, you know, what does

it mean to you to feel that way? Just give yourself some

room to give to think about the obstacle.

Like, I can't have joy because my my mom died and

she's not here, something like that. Right? I'm not gonna be able to feel

joy. And then you can challenge yourself. You'll say, yeah. You

know what? It's sad that your parent your mom isn't here to celebrate this thing

or that your partner isn't supportive or whatever it is. And that's okay. You

can feel sad, and it's not a betrayal to feel joy.

You have to actually soothe the part of you and

reassure the fear or the obstacle that comes up and give

yourself some new framework.

So it's like I can't be present if I'm thinking about the

past, and then I give myself a reminder

that, oh, in the past, I did my best a my best was

good enough. Or I yeah. I'm like, oh, the obstacles. I

can't feel present because the future I'm worried about the future. And it's

like, oh, I don't need to worry about the future because I

have overcome a lot of obstacles in the past. So you're

looking to find a a a way to

truly get to that feeling state as much as you can and

really imagine feeling that feeling in

your body in that moment. K. Isn't this cool so

far? I hope you're, like, kinda doing it with me. Now

how do we then reinforce that feeling state? How do

we keep it? How do we shift back into it? And

that is through our thoughts. So,

remember, I defined this process that, like, with

every thought or a that gets repeated in the brain, a neural

pathway is formed and reinforced. So our brain is

a muscle and when we have the same thought over and over,

the thought or neuro pathway a stronger. So

you're choosing a feeling, you're chasing

a feeling, and it feels like chasing because it's

not easy to catch. It's, like, kind of right

in front of you, and then you grab it, and then it pulls away again.

And then you grab it and it pulls away again. That's because there's a neural

pathway there that's in resistance. You're trying to you're like,

a farmer with a plow, you know, plowing and toiling

over hard, hard soil that has never been

plowed before. So you're working hard at

getting back to that feeling state. So how do you do

that? You do it through your thoughts. So

the first question, how do I wanna feel? A question,

what does that feeling mean to me? If you can't feel

it, you work through the obstacles. And then step

4 is what thoughts help me feel

that feeling. This is where the thoughts come in

first. I teach this where I start with the feeling state that we're

chasing, and then we find thoughts that match that.

Some coaches teach this different. They teach it thinking to lead to

feeling. I teach it feeling to lead to thinking. So now we're

intentionally thinking. So then I wrote thoughts

to help me feel present. This is literally I'm reading from my journal, everybody.

Okay. So I started with, like, a

generic thought, like, everything will work out. This is a

highlight in Sawyer's life. I'm proud of him and us.

And then I got I could really start to kinda chase it and I was

like, Darlynn, enjoy this.

Be here. Pay attention.

Breathe. And when I found those thoughts,

I was like, ah, okay. I found

it. I'm here. So,

now, how do I shift my

mood? If I catch myself

in a feeling state and I am

noticing that I'm grumpy, I'm noticing that I'm,

you know, hyper controlling. I noticed that I'm short-tempered. I

noticed that I calm, you know, whatever feeling

state that I find myself in in a negative feeling

state, then I have to go back and use my

thoughts to get me back to the feeling. So

that's where I say, Darlynn, enjoy this, be

here, pay attention and breathe. That

becomes a little bit of my mantra. So, really, I'm gonna

just pick enjoy this, enjoy this, enjoy this.

A gonna move back into the feeling state

by using my thoughts. It's a little bit like

meditation. You know, how when you are

meditating, if you've ever done it, you, you know,

you close your eyes and you focus on your breath. You breathe it in, you

know, you focus on your breath coming through your nostrils and then you breathe out,

focusing on the breath coming out through your nostrils. So you just are really focused

on your breathing in and out. And what happens is

you lose the thread of your breath a your brain, monkey mind as

they call it, starts a all around. And you're all of a sudden

making a grocery list while also planning someone's birthday party, while while also figuring out

carpool pickup and then also figuring out what you need to pack in the snack

bag. Right? And you're like, woah. Wait. Wait. Wait. I'm supposed to be meditating.

And then people go, oh, I suck at meditating. Of course, we all suck at

meditating because our brain is busy.

So it you don't suck at meditating if you come

back to the breath. And you can hold it as long as you can hold

it, and then your monkey mind takes off again and you bring it back to

the breath. So in this practice that I'm teaching you,

when you notice your feeling state has changed, you find your mantra,

Darlynn, enjoy this. Be here. And

then I'm back here. I'm back in that present state that I wanna be

in. So that's how you actually

shift your mood. You predecide how

do you wanna feel. You give yourself

definition of that and try to really overcome the obstacles and

embody that feeling state as much as you

can working through any a, and then you find

some thoughts that help support that feeling feeling so that you can

get back there. That's the whole thing.

So now when can you do this? Like I said, you can do it before

a vacation. You can do it on the daily. You can do it before in

laws. You can do it before your holidays. You can also do it about your

body. How do I wanna feel in my bathing suit? How do I wanna feel,

you know, at this wedding or whatever it is? So this

is honestly a practice that I use and

do a. And I can

tell sometimes, like, say, the summer starts. I have not done this

to be perfectly honest about the summer Become, well, my son's not we're not in

there yet. Right? And

we're, so I'm not really, like, in the summer mode

yet, but I will be, you know, intentionally thinking about

it. To be honest, I'm having a little foot surgery, and that

is what I wanna be intentionally thinking about. I wanna be what's my

mood? What's my feeling state? What are the thoughts so that I can

recover quickly? Because I I believe in the power of

mindset and all of that in order to help your body feel good.

So I'm, you know, I'm doing this

on purpose all the time, and I invite you to do it on purpose as

well. Chase the feeling, shift your mood. That's the

key. If you are listening to this and you're

like, okay, I think I get it, but I don't know for sure.

You can reach out to me on Instagram at Darlynn Childress

and just DM me, and I'll I don't check it that much, but I'll

we'll get to you. Or you can book a a complimentary

consultation with me a, you know, get,

get some support. Let you know, talk to me about what you're thinking, what you're

feeling, if you're if you're a. And then you can also join to work with

me. I've recently revamped the Calm Mama Club. It's now

$30 a month. It's a month to month subscription. Cancel anytime,

kinda like Netflix. And you can join and come to

those weekly coaching sessions and get real

time support from me while also learning from, like, incredible

amazing moms in that group. And so you

can join that. You can also work with me privately, or we can just

meet on that consultation. I'll just listen to you, learn a little bit about you,

help you a little bit. Yeah. So just reach

out. Don't do this by yourself if you're struggling. And,

oh, I meant to mention that one of the books that I

use to handle to, like, learn about feelings is Brene

Brown's book, Atlas of the Heart. I think of it as a feelings a,

and I highly highly recommend that if you're were wondering how

to, like, define emotion. There's a bunch of good

definitions in there. Alright, mamas. I am wishing

you all the good feelings, all the good vibes, and this

beautiful process to help you get there. And like always, if you need

anything, reach out to me. Otherwise, I will talk to you next week.