54. Creating a Snowglobe: Protecting Your Relationships from Outside Opinions

In this insightful episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, we delve into the metaphor of the "snowglobe" to explore how to safeguard your relationships from the overwhelming opinions and external influences that can threaten their strength. Discover how building a protective emotional barrier enhances self-worth, fosters resilience, and maintains clarity in your connections with loved ones.

Join me as I share practical strategies for reinforcing your emotional space and maintaining confidence in your relationships. Whether it's with your partner, children, or friends, learn how to create a supportive environment that thrives on love and trust.

Tune in for actionable tips that promote mindful planning and personal growth, helping you navigate the complexities of relationships while staying true to yourself.

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This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher.

Transcript

Welcome back to the podcast. I want to talk to you today about how to keep our relationships strong in a world filled with a lot of opinions and outside influences. Keep in mind, I want you to think about your relationship with yourself as one of those relationships. So, when I coach my clients on this, I use the visual of a snow globe.

OK, that will take just ourselves in the snow globe first. So, if we’ve got this snow globe, we’re inside. People can come and shake it up, right? And they can try and mess with it, but we’re protected. We have built ourselves a nice, resilient bubble of self-worth, self-esteem, and self-reliance that people cannot mess with. OK? And sometimes it might make things blurry for a second, right? Someone can really shake us, and that’s kind of like that snow flying around. We get a little dizzy and disheveled, but at the end of the day, we are protected in our bubble.

This can be any relationship, right? So, this could be me and my husband; we have a snow globe. So it doesn’t matter what anyone else says about our relationship because we’re in there, and we’ve built our relationship based on what we think about our relationship. That’s what builds our bubble—our thoughts about it, our self-reliance, our love for each other. That builds our bubble. We have a snow globe with each of the kids; we have a snow globe with each kid, right? Every relationship can be sort of in these bubbles, the snow globes, and they’re all built from the inside.

OK, so when we think of it this way, it can just help us maintain clarity and connection with whoever is in the globe with us. So, this is sort of my metaphor that I share about protecting ourselves from other people’s opinions and protecting our relationship with others from other people’s opinions and influences. So, it’s almost like a safeguarded emotional space in there, right? I’m a very visual person; this helps me a lot to think of it this way. It also helps me to realize we have to reinforce it from the inside.

So, let’s go back to our personal snow globe, our personal bubble. When we talk about things like our self-esteem and our self-worth, we are building our resilience. We are building our barrier, our emotional barrier. We are building the strength of the glass of that snow globe from the inside. OK? No one from the outside can do this for us. We build it. If you build it, and the bigger your snow globe is, the bigger you are, the more people are probably gonna try and kind of see how strong those walls are. They might come and shake it; let them!

We’ve talked about this before—just talking about other people’s thoughts, other people’s opinions. When we take what other people say and we think it’s true, we are using their opinions as—we’re borrowing their opinions and making them our thoughts. Right? So if someone comes and says, “Stacy, I really think you’re ugly. You’re gross. I hate you,” right? If I have not built my snow globe, if I do not have self-worth, if I have not told myself nice things, if my self is awful, those things are really gonna affect me. Right? My globe is not strong. I do not have a good boundary around myself, and those things are really gonna shake me to my core, and it’s gonna be very hard to recover.

If I have done the work of saying nice things to myself, building up myself, knowing that I’m a good person—all nice things about myself—I’d like to start this with one nice thing a day. Say one nice thing to yourself a day. That’s how we start to build a sort of more solid barrier, where you will get to a point where it doesn’t matter what anyone says about you. Your self has built around you sometimes love shield too when I’m talking about couples.

So let’s go to the snow globe with my husband, right? That snow globe is secure. That wall, that barrier is only as strong as I have made it with my thoughts—not his thoughts. Listen to me: my thoughts. That relationship and the strength of that relationship is built on my thoughts. I am building the wall with my thoughts. So if I start the day thinking about all the things he did wrong, that wall is not going to be strong. And if someone comes and shakes our snow globe, you can see how it could even put a crack in it.

Right? If I’m already—it’s not strong. If I have not shielded it up and put a crack in it, I’ve woken up and gone with all the things I love about him and remind myself of all the nice things he’s done for me and how much fun we have and how we make each other laugh, and all those wonderful things, that glass in my snow globe is solid. So, nothing shakes that because I have made it solid. I didn’t need him to do that. I didn’t mention his name once and having him do anything. I have made it impenetrable to other people’s opinions.

Now, Mamas, I want you to hear this. If you were distracted, come back to me. With your children, you build that snow globe with your thoughts about your relationship with them and your ability as a mom. And it doesn’t matter what anyone says. There’s a lot of society saying you should do it just perfectly to be the perfect mom. So, there are people shaking that snow globe constantly trying to tell you that your relationship is not what it’s supposed to be. It’s not good enough. You’re not a good enough mom.

Build that snow globe tight! Build that wall up! The only person that has to do that is you. So, just like we did our thing here, all the way, I’m the perfect mom for these boys. All the things we did together—all the things we did together—here, I help them. I’m teaching them to pack their own lunch; I’m teaching them to get ready in the morning. Look at what I’m doing. And then I build that snow globe up so it is impenetrable.

So when I see some Instagram post, some ridiculous box, I don’t feel bad. That’s great! I feel nothing but amazement and gratitude and love for her. I don’t feel—there’s no resentment or feeling bad because I’m solid. My walls and my snow globe are solid.

Changes every interaction you have with people. I saw that was not doing well. It was not solid. I would have a lot of negative feelings about that about her. Like, “Why you gotta do that? Why you gotta make people feel bad? Why you gotta shame?” Right? I’ve built my shield. I don’t even see it as that.

So you can totally change your relationship. Change your interaction with the world when your love shield is strong. The example I always give: love shield with my husband. He comes home, and it’s been a day that I’ve been working from home. He says like, “Oh, what did you do today?” Curiosity; I’m sure you were amazing. “What did you get done?” I had a reinforced relationship that shield, and he comes and says, “What you do all day?” This is how I hear it: “What did you do all day?” The very same words came out of his mouth, but my interpretation of—and then reaction to—my thoughts about my reaction to them—everything is very different, and the only thing that changed was if I felt solid in our relationship or not.

This goes with every single relationship. This is your relationship. If you are feeling strong and confident, nobody can say anything to you. You’re not gonna interpret it in a negative way. If you’re feeling strong in your relationship, it’s hard for your partner to say. It’s gonna be much harder to say something that’s gonna sort of trigger you if you’re feeling solid in your relationship with your kids. As a mom, no one’s gonna be able to make you feel like a bad mom.

My doctors, listen to me: same thing! When you’ve reinforced, reconnected, and thought, “These are all the times I’ve been an amazing doctor. These are all the times that my patients have really loved coming to me, that they’ve been so appreciative.” No one’s gonna make you feel like a bad doctor that day.

I think so talking about burnout and resilience, and just our interpretation of the events of the day can be so dramatically different if we have done just like five minutes of work in the morning to sort of shore up some of these walls to reinforce that snow globe.

The globe is solid. Mess with that part, like the snow globe. Right? My mom is not coming with my husband. His mom is not coming with us. It’s just us kids—just me and my husband and the kids—just us. No one else is allowed in there.

So I think it’s just the sort of protective emotional barrier it gives me around my relationships to think of it in this way. I love how sharing those things, making sure they’re strong in the beginning of the day, totally changes my experience of the world and how tired I feel at the end of the day. I feel a lot less. I am able to just sort of not be affected by other people’s opinions.

And this is how I do that. I teach my clients how to do that. You gotta start with your own snow globe first. Put your oxygen mask on first! Our snow globe—we make that strong by positive self-talk. A gratitude journal is amazing for this. I like to have my clients sort of write, “These are my wins for the day.” You have to start with, “These are the reasons I’m amazing. These are all the reasons I love myself. These are the reasons other people love me.”

And it’s not awkward, but when we do it, it’s so much easier to do with the other ones. We don’t always have to redo all the work on ourselves in every different relationship. We’ve done it with ours; that’s the hardest one. It’s so much easier than to go through and do every other one.

I think these snow globes can be super helpful, especially if you’re going through your day really triggered. If you need help with this, I would love to help you with a free Healthy relationship session. When we protect them from external negativity, and we do that by creating a protective barrier around it, the only one that needs to do that is us.

We don’t need anyone else to do that. We can do that all on our own. It is not that hard, and it can totally change your entire experience of your day and the people around you. And I think it makes me more appreciative of the relationships that I have because I feel like those relationships are stronger and better.

I think this visual really helps a lot of clients. It can help you, and if it did, please share this with a friend. And if you need help creating a snow globe, please reach out. I’m happy to help.

All right, until next week, y’all have a good one.