Intentional Living with Tanya Hale

It can be easy, and even feel intuitive, to get in the middle of other people's business. And it's even easier when they invite us in, asking for verification that what they are thinking is true and what they are feeling is valid. When we feel we're being pulled into someone else's relationship, it's important that we learn to stay out and let the be responsible for their own relationship. In this...

So many of us feel blindsided when it comes to the relationships with our adult children. We heard a lot about the struggles of being a parent to babies, toddlers, tots, pre-teens, and teenagers, but not a lot about our role and relationship with adult children. The reason it can be so challenging is because so many of us struggle to let go of our parenting role and we can often feel that their de...

The conflict between our primitive brain and our prefrontal cortex is as old as our brain itself. Primitive brain wants to avoid pain, pursue immediate pleasure, and conserve energy, while our prefrontal cortex wants to plan for long-term goals and growth to improve the quality of our life. This conflict will often trigger internal negotiation between the two parts of our brain. When we can learn...

Our brain loves a good story, and what it doesn't know in facts, it will make up with fiction. It also really like to have a villain, a hero, and a victim in its story, and it especially loves to put us in the victim mode because when there we don't have to shoulder the responsibility for solving our problems, we can just stay in a place of blame, criticism, and accusation. If we are to move out o...

It can be so easy to neglect the relationships we most value because we have this ideas that they will always be there. And then, because of the neglect, they are no longer there. We may still be married, but we are distant and disconnected, and it can seem daunting to find our way back to connection. But it is possible to change the trajectory of our disconnected relationship and come back into f...

When we over-function, we are stepping into other people's lanes and taking responsibility that is not ours. When we under-function, we are stepping back and inviting people into our lane to do things that we are responsible for doing. These one-up and one-down behaviors are so detrimental to our relationships and not only stem from our own insecurities but also feed the insecurities of others and...

Continuing our journey this week of discovering ways that we can ive a more luxurious life by creating energy, living in alignment with our values, and stepping into the person we have the possibility of being. Living a luxurious life requires intention and focus, it requires discipline and dedication. And it is so worth it. When we are living with a bucket that is filled to overflowing, we are li...

Many of us dream of living a luxurious life, and we tend to confine that idea to materialistic luxury, houses and cars and clothing and jewelry and travel, all the things money can buy. And yet there is another type of luxury I want to talk about with you today, and it's the luxury of living in alignment with our God-given possibility, the luxury of living a life that creates more energy than it e...

Sexuality between men and women can get complicated because we experience it so differently. And until we can begin to understand and accept those differences, and then learn to work with them rather than fighting against them, we will struggle to find the connection and intimacy that a great sexual relationship has to offer us. In this podcast I am speaking with Dan Purcell, a life coach and Chri...

If we want to increase the intimacy and connection in our relationships, it is imperative that we show up as a safe person who creates a safe space. Often, the patterns we have established in our relationships are the opposite of safe, they cause our primitive brains to go into hyper protective mode and want to run away emotionally and physically. But when we can learn to show up safe, time and ti...

Difficult emotions can be, well, difficult. And because they don't feel good, we will often dismiss, ignore, or resist them, which can be unfortunate when there is so much amazing information behind the emotions we are feeling and why we are feeling them. When we can learn to be aware of the emotion and then step into curiosity to figure out what it is teaching us about ourselves, we become empowe...

Our insecurities and the protective nature of our primitive brain can make meaningful connection in our relationships difficult. These protective tendencies make it difficult for us to step into truly listening and seeking to understand the other person. When we can learn to consciously set aside these human tendencies to preserve and protect ourselves, in areas where we really don't need protecti...

When Stacey first met me for her free consult, she was months out from a divorce and really struggling getting her feet on the ground. She was stuck in victim mentality and it was impacting the relationships with her children, herself, and everyone else. We started coaching one-on-one, and within 1 1/2 years, Stacy was on solid ground, had cleaned up her relationships with her children, and met an...

Besides all of the life changes that occur in middle-age such as children leaving home, readjusting our marriage relationships, figuring out our next life steps, aging parents, etc., how about we add on a heaping serving of menopause where our hormones change and adjust and it affects us not only physically, but also mentally and emotionally as well. So much in such a small time space! On this pod...

For many of us, fun is something that became more elusive as we got older. We were so involved in making sure our children and our spouses were doing well, that they were learning and growing and having fun, that our own fun often got put on the back burner. And yet, having fun and engaging in play is an important part of our mental and emotional health and is also super important to our relations...

Many of us think that if we could just take a confidence pill that everything in our life would be different, because confidence impacts our courage to step into new and sometimes scary situations and to take risks that could make our lives better. And yet, we all have confidence. Sometimes that confidence is just in things, but what we mostly struggle with is confidence in our SELVES. The confide...

Sione and I are just hitting our third anniversary. On this podcast we share what we have learned and incorporated this last year regarding how curiosity creates a safe space. Learning to slow down, to pause before responding, to remember that this is the person we love the most and choosing to show up curious and kind and compassionate have been important for us in creating a relationship that is...

Sometimes we go into a one-down space and spin in shame, other times we might go into a one-up space and justify our poor behavior by blaming others, both responses that harm our relationships. When we can, instead, approach our struggles from an 'all people are equal' mentality, we have the capacity to offer ourselves grace for our humanity. Understanding that all people are humans who make mista...

Divorce is one of those experiences that kicks you in the chest and knocks you on your butt, and it can be so difficult to get back up. And yet, at some point we have to get back up and step back into life. And though it's a tough road, it isn't impossible and it doesn't have to take forever. In this podcast I share some of my own insights about my divorce and four suggestions on how you can get b...

All of us have people who don't like us, even if we are the most kind and Christlike person we know.  It's just part of our human experience. When we can learn to accept other people's agency to not like us, we can let go of self-defeating behaviors like people-pleasing, perfectionist tendencies, trying to buy their love with time, money, energy, or resources, or beating ourselves up for 'not bein...

Expectation is a funny word. It means that we think something should happen a certain way or that someone should behave in a certain way, two things we rarely, if ever, have control over. What I've found is that expectations I have are often a cause of shame for the other person, and also for me. And shame is never a productive emotion. And yet, it's hard not to have expectations. So, how do we mo...

All relationships struggle, so all relationships need repair. Knowing how to repair is an essential skill for creating healthy and happy relationships, and that darn ego of ours can make it so difficult to show up in loving and kind ways because it wants to be right and it wants to prove to our spouse how wrong they are. But learning to show up creating a safe space for our spouse, especially in t...

I love Viktor Frankl's quote "Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." I am reminded by this that my power, my strength, and my freedom is created in the space between the stimulus (circumstance) and my response (my actions). But sometimes that space can seem so, so, so small.  We can tend t...

Just as women were raised with societal ideas and expectations around their sexuality, so were men. And so many of these ideas are actually harmful, and even destructive, to the emotional intimacy we desire in our relationships. In this podcast my husband, Sione, shares the concepts and ideas around sexuality that he learned growing up and how he learned to address them to create the emotional con...

Learning how to be vulnerable can be a scary and tough skill to acquire. So can learning to let other people in our lives be vulnerable. Because when others show up vulnerable, it can shake our ideas about who they are, it can shift our relationships, and it can challenge our own difficult emotions. But relationships will only thrive toward greater intimacy when we are vulnerable and when we creat...