Intentional Living with Tanya Hale

We hear a lot of talk about how hard it is to raise toddlers and teenagers, but not many of us were prepared for the challenges of having adult children.  In this episode we are discussing five reasons it can be so challenging and how to work through them so you can be the kind of person you really want to be with your adult children. Want to check out some more podcasts about adult children? #99...

In recent years, fawning has been added to the survival responses of flight, flight, and freeze. While fight is a conflict strategy and flight and freeze are avoidant strategies, fawning is referred to as an appeasement strategy.  When we fawn we seek to bring ourselves into alignment with the other person, who our brains perceive as a threat, by people-pleasing, saying yes when we want to say no,...

Sometimes the decisions we need to make feel overwhelming and super scary.  And because of that we hesitate and procrastinate, and we drag it out and cause ourselves extra hours, days, weeks, months, or even years of angst as we struggle to make the decision.  How can we find the confidence to make decisions easier and faster?  And how will we know if the decision we make is right?  The answer to...

People having a mid-life crisis is common enough that it is often the focus of movies and tv shows, memes and jokes.  It is often portrayed as middle-aged people buying expensive cars or running off and having an affair.  But a mid-life crisis does not need to be something that brings down the financial well-being or the family.  If we understand it and approach it from the inside, rather than the...

Setting healthy boundaries is an important part in every relationship, and sometimes, it is just so hard.  When the other person is not happy about the boundary, when they get angry or make accusations or threats, it can be so challenging to stick with what we feel is important for our relationship.  So, when we get pushback from those few special people in our lives, how can we hold to the boudar...

This week I get to interview my husband, Sione, on his experience with moving forward after divorce.  Though it can often feel as though divorce is the end, and it absolutely is in some ways, it can also be the beginning of greater self-awareness, cleaning up your dysfunctional behaviors, and creating a life, and even a relationship, you could only dream about when you were in the thick of a reall...

Divorce is tough, and when it happens to you, it can be devastating, and it can feel like the end.  And to be honest, in many ways it is. But divorce can also be the beginning of finding yourself in a way you never have before.  It can be the beginning of understanding who you really are and how you can grow into a healtheir and happier version of yourself.  In this episode I am talking with my go...

There are parts of our relationships that we would consider 'business', and parts that we would consider 'personal'.  When we get the two all jumbled together, we end up with a lot of drama and miscommunication.  On this podcast I'm talking with my great friend and fellow coach Wendy Lee Johnson about how we can recognize these two aspects of our relationships and approach them differently to stre...

In Terrence Real's new book 'Us', (one of my newest favorites) he talks about our adaptive child.  This is the part of us that learned to adapt to the dysfunctional parts of our childhoods, which we all had.  And although these adaptive behaviors served and protected us as children, very often they are destructive to our adult relationships.  In this episode, I am sharing Terry's insight about our...

When I work with many of my clients regarding their one-up and one-down beliefs and behaviors, they often find themselves at a loss to describe what an equal response would look like or sound like in their circumstance.  We don't live in a world where equal partnerships have been modeled for us, in fact, mostly we live in a world where the opposite has been modeled, in our families or origin, exte...

Some of the areas where we can feel the most stuck in our lives are places where we are just dabbling with change in our lives rather than digging in and doing what needs to happen to create the change we want.  And yet, dabbling is comfortable and easy and even justifiable, whereas committing to doing is scary and risky and requires some determination and courage.  When we choose to move into doi...

When we're not paying close attention, we can very easily slip into critical words and behaviors in our relationships.  Often, we won't even see it, because in our minds we are being helpful or just expressing concern or our opinion, but it can still very easily be perceived as criticism.  And criticism breaks down relationship by treading on trust and respect.  When we create awareness around our...

We live in a society that can be a little happiness obsessed at times.  And though the thought of being happy all the time can sound lovely, it's just not going to happen.  Life is meant to be messy, to be challenging, and to provide us with a lot of opportunities to figure out the tough stuff.  It can be difficult to remember this when we live in a world where discomfort is seen as a problem to b...

Most of us, at one time or another, have had a story that we are not good enough.  And it can really wreak havoc in our lives.  It can cause us to feel insecure, and from that place we struggle to be the person we really want to be.  Understanding how to address our 'not good enough' thoughts is a life-changing skill that will bring a confident and beautiful approach to life.  

It is really easy for us to create dysfunctional and destructive relationships when we haven't learned how to respect and honor others' personalities, preferences, and perspectives.  These three things are at the heart of who people are, and when we reject these things, we reject them.  And when we reject them, we shut down the opportunity to create deeper friendship and intimacy.

Although I talk about the thought model and use it here on the podcast, it's been a while since I talked about the basic parts of it and how they work together.  On this podcast we will be looking at how the circumstances in our lives are neutral, how we have thoughts about those circumstances, how those thoughts create feelings, how our feelings fuel our actions, and then how our actions create t...

John Gottman is a brilliant relationship expert who has done an amazing amount of research on what makes marriages successful.  He has identified four elements of dysfunctional behavior in marriages that are especially destructive, and he calls these The Four Horsemen.  These four elements are criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling.  In this podcast we are digging into these four beh...

Our primitive brain does some amazing things for us.  However, if we aren't paying attention, it can keep us stuck and struggling to create the kind of life we really want to have.  When we learn to manage our primitive brain and engage our pre-frontal cortex, we have the capacity to really show up for our life in the ways we want.  On today's podcast, we're learning just how to use your brain to...

Today Sione and I are celebrating our second year of marriage, and we have a lot to celebrate!  In this podcast we are talking about how we have grown this past year, tools we have learned and implemented, and ideas we have come to understand better.  This is a chance for you to see how the tools I teach here on the podcast are implemented in real life.  

I think a lot of us grew up believing, at some level, that love was a reward for good behavior.  And yet, when looked at through the eyes of God, love is never a reward.  Love is actually the first and greatest commandment, it is a law. The law of love teaches us that regardless of how others act, regardless of how we're treated, regardless of what is said or done, our responsibility in every situ...

Many of the people I work with who are struggling in their marriages find friendship with their partner to be elusive.  It was there when they got married, and over time, they have become more and more distant, negative, and dismissive, until they find they just don't have a good friendship with their spouse anymore.  And this is a huge problem.  Dr. John Gottman, a relationship expert has said, '...

I hear so many people who just want us all to get along.  What many of them are meaning is, why can't everyone have the same opinions and wants and needs?  Why doesn't everyone just do things the way I want and then it would be easy?  Of course that would be easy, it would also defeat a huge part of the reason we are here on earth, to learn to be more loving and accepting and respectful of other p...

When we feel safe in our relationships, we feel we can show up with more vulnerability.  When we show up with more vulnerability, we create more emotional and physical intimacy.  But oftentimes, the behaviors we are engaging in in our relationships put the other person into protective mode rather than feeling safe, and so we struggle to create the connected relationships we really desire.  In this...

So many of us did not learn growing up what it means to be in a relationship.  If you're like me, you thought that growing up and getting married would mean that you would have someone to love you, to shore up your insecurities, to validate you, or to agree with your opinions.  If you're like me, what you wouldn't have thought was that a relationship is a place to learn how to be more loving and k...

When I really got serious about dating in my 50's, I used something called the 90-day Relationship.  An idea baby of Brooke Castillo from The Life Coach School, I took it and ran with it.  Basically, you're all in, fully committed, and figuring things out for 90 days.  It was a brilliant process for me to figure out relationships more and to find my person.  Through this process I discovered some...