Episode #183: What Did 2024 Teach Me?

[00:01:05] Well, hello, hello everybody, and happy New Year to you. This is Heather Moulder, host of the Life & Law Podcast. I’m so excited to be here with you in the new year.

Today we are going to go into something I’ve done at the beginning of every new year since I’ve started this podcast. We’re going to go into the lessons that I learned this past year that I would like to speak about a little bit in the hopes that you can learn from them as well.

A couple of these were a little bit hard for me. Most lessons I think that we learn and that we would look back on over the past year are typically kind of hard. But I want to, I want to note something here:

You might not like everything I have to share with you today. And if that is the case for you, this is especially the case with the last lesson, the fourth lesson I’m going to go over. Which might just mean you need to hear it. So my one request for you is to listen with an open mind and ask yourself how you might be able to apply these lessons into your life as well.

So we’re just going to get right into it. Hopefully, today is short and sweet, but very powerful.

Lesson number one for what 2024 taught me: Embracing change isn’t the same thing as accepting change.

Now, I’m pretty sure I’ve talked before about embracing change and how we all need to embrace it and how we also need to accept it. And I think before 2024, I kind of saw these two things similarly, or pretty much the same. That embracing was the same as accepting. This last year has taught me that is not the case. And here’s why.

So I have a freshman in college, Zachary. He went off this last fall to college, and it’s my first to leave the nest, and he went pretty far. So we live in Dallas, Texas. He is going to the Ohio State University and is in Columbus, Ohio for his college. And that was really hard for me as a mom.

[00:03:09] And this particular lesson taught me that I had gotten pretty good at accepting change, allowing it to just let be, not fighting it, maybe even letting go of some of my expectations, living within it without having to do anything. To me, that’s what acceptance is. And that’s always what I’ve talked about before when I talk about accepting and embracing change. But this particular change was a little bit harder for me and it taught me that if you really want to embrace it, you’ve got to go a little bit further.

[00:03:49] And so what I think of it now is it’s allowing yourself to go with the new flow without much friction, not just to let it be. Because what I was finding is when I was just letting it be, that I still worried, that I still overthought things, that I was ruminating a little bit more. And I realized, you know what? I’ve accepted this. I know I can’t change things, but I need to embrace this more so that I can move on and proactively help this change along.

To me, that’s what embracing actually is, to proactively help it along.

[00:04:30] And what that looks like is going to be different for every individual and the case at hand. But for me, what that meant was letting go of Life 360. So for those of you who are parents out there, you probably know what life360 is. For those of you who aren’t, it’s this amazing app that when your kids start to drive you can follow along with where they are, and it basically shows you where they are, and it shows you the route they’ve taken to get to places. And it basically enables you to check in with them at any given moment and see what. What they’re up to.

Well, I needed to let go of that completely. And no judgment here, because I happen to know a lot of parents who do not do that when their kids go off to college. For me, I needed to, because otherwise I was going to be looking at it and I wasn’t going to be allowing myself to accept fully and mostly to embrace this change that he is now an adult. He’s 19 years old. He is on his own. He needs to make his own mistakes. He needs to learn his own lessons, and he still has his parents as a backstop, but this is really on him, and he needs to be independent. This is his chance.

And, you know, when you’re off at college, you’re pretty independent, but you still have a structure around you with your professors and your dorms and your. The friends and the structure of school. So it’s not a complete independence in some ways. So I needed to let him be more independent and let go and let go of that. So that was one of the proactive things I needed to do to fully embrace the change.

The other thing is I started changing the kinds of things I would tell him and talk to him. So one of the things we agreed to when he first went off was he wanted advice, tips, different things for how to study, for how to stay focused, for how to stay on track, for not being too introverted and getting out of his shell.

Some of this was things I learned growing up because he. He’s like me in that way. He is more introverted, and he’s very comfortable at home and very comfortable on his own, but also he’s happier when he’s out and about at least a certain amount and with people. And so we made an agreement, and I basically said, okay, I’m gonna send you a Sunday email for a while and I’m gonna give you my tips and I’m gonna talk to you about things I learned, and I’m even gonna admit some of my mistakes.

[00:06:54] And that was the other thing I learned. That part of embracing it was treating him like the adult he actually is and allowing him to know a little bit more about me and my mistakes and things I’ve learned the hard way. Because as a parent, it sometimes is hard to let your kids know these things, to admit that you’ve made these types of mistakes, especially the bigger ones that we’ve made, that we don’t want our kids to know. Certainly at a certain age, we don’t need them repeating them. Right?

[00:07:21] But there does come a time where your relationship starts to change and you want to open up a little bit more, and maybe that’s a healthier way of going about it. For me, that’s what embracing meant.

So my question to you would be, based on this is, where might you need to not just accept, not just say, “okay, yeah, change happens. I’m going to let it be; I’m not going to fight it.” but then to proactively help it along and to create a new flow with that change?

[00:07:56] Those things that I did, funny enough, once I started doing more of that and leaning into it and fully embracing it, helped me to feel more aligned at home. Because it is a really weird feeling when somebody who’s been around for 19 years of his life is all of a sudden gone. There was this new normal we had to create with my other son and without Zachary being there. And it felt odd and weird the first couple of weeks. But doing these things with Zach helped me to lean into that a little bit more and helped me to let go a little bit more. So where might you need to not just accept, but embrace, proactively help it along.

[00:08:38] That’s embracing change. Okay, so that was lesson number one.

Lesson number two: life isn’t linear.

[00:08:46] We often learn lessons and we think we only need to learn them once. That’s not true. I learned that this last year.

So sometimes you learn a lesson as applied in one area of your life that later needs to be learned again so that you can apply it into another area of your life.

Letting go, letting go of control, letting go of other people’s opinions, that type of letting go.

[00:09:20] I did this in spades when I first started this business. In fact, it, it took a couple of years. I’m pretty sure this was one of the lessons I had a couple of years ago for you guys about letting go, letting go of what other people think of me. And that was really in respect of the job that I do because I had always self identified as a lawyer and I no longer was a practicing lawyer. I was, you know, creating this new business that I felt a little bit of imposter syndrome around and, and I, I went through this whole identity crisis that frankly a lot of lawyers go through at some point in their lives – especially as they start to wind down and know that this isn’t going to be the only thing I do anymore.

[00:09:59] And that was hard.  But I was able to get there and I’ve, I’ve totally let go of what other people think of me in that respect. But when it comes to being a mom, I needed some work. And this again came up because of Zachary leaving the nest. So you know what, our kids make mistakes. Our kids have wins. Our kids do things and we parents get really proud. We also get obsessed a little bit over their mistakes and we take them on for ourselves oftentimes.

[00:10:37] And I’ve started to realize over this last year just how much that happens as a parent. I don’t think it’s as obvious until they start to leave the nest and you start to realize how much you take that on as part of your self identity even.

[00:10:50] And him leaving meant I needed to let go of that to some extent. In order to help him be more independent, I needed to let go of that. So this goes hand in hand with that change thing, but it’s, it’s a little bit different, right?

[00:11:07] So my question started to be, well, when do his mistakes become his own and not about me? And also when do his wins and the things that he does that are really cool, aren’t they really mostly about him and not about me and how I raised him? I mean, obviously we raise our kids a certain way. It helps to create a person. But they are their own beings as well.

[00:11:29] They have their own personalities, they have their own values, they have their own desires. They’re not the same as us. And no matter how hard we say this as parents throughout our lives, you realize when they go off that you didn’t fully integrate that into your life. That’s what I’ve found. And I needed to let go even more.

[00:11:53] And part of that meant letting go about worrying about all the things that could go wrong.

[00:12:00] Worrying about: is he prepared for his exams? Right?

[00:12:05] It’s not on me, it’s on him.

[00:12:08] He is to make his own way. His mistakes are on him, but also his wins are his as well.

[00:12:15] And none of this stuff: wins, mistakes, whatever we’re talking about, good and bad, it doesn’t, it doesn’t really mean anything for me. Now, it does mean something because I care about him. But it, it doesn’t say anything about, about me.

[00:12:32] I had to let go of that as part of this change.

[00:12:37] And I will say, and the reason it is a separate lesson, obviously, but it goes hand in hand with that change piece and proactively embracing it. I had to learn how to proactively embrace the change in order for me to also get to this point where I was like, you know what? This isn’t about me, it’s about him. And I need to let go of that. That letting go peace.

[00:13:03] So I started this out as life isn’t linear (because it’s not). It is the overarching lesson that I learned.

Sometimes we learn lessons that we think we fully learned, but maybe not. Maybe there are other ways in which we need to learn the same lesson. This lesson was letting go. Letting go about what others think about me based on my own kids and what they do. And letting go of them and the worry and also the self identity piece.

I’m still a mom, but I’m in a new role as a mom with him now. And that has been really interesting and fun and a little scary too, because it means he’s on his own. And he gets to decide. And he gets to make decisions. And he doesn’t come to me as much. He still does about certain things because he values my opinion and my husband’s too. But it’s okay that he doesn’t on so many things as well.

[00:14:03] All right, so that was lesson number two.

Lesson number three: selling isn’t about me, it’s about the client.

[00:14:09] This is also something that I thought I’d learned a while ago. In fact, I wrestled with this when I first started this business.

[00:14:17] Selling isn’t about me, it’s about the client.

[00:14:23] And I’ve said this before to you, it’s not about you, it’s about them. I teach this. I talk about it often. But again, sometimes we need reminders. And this year I was reminded of this.

So there was this new client who recently joined my mastermind that begins in January.

[00:14:41] Now, I’ve known her for a year and a half, two years now. Because two years, two masterminds ago, she reached out and was interested, but ultimately decided it wasn’t the right time for her. And then I reached out to her in the last round, at the end of last fall for the one that was 2024, and she said, no, it wasn’t the right time. Now I remember thinking, and actually being bothered this last time because I specifically reached out to her thinking she would be a great fit for the group I’m putting together based on what I know about her and the members that are coming together.

And I was disappointed, and I thought I was disappointed not for me, but for her. Because I was like, you know what? She would be such a great member. This would help her so much.

[00:15:25] I thought she could really, really use it.

[00:15:29] But now that I’ve gotten to know her more, now that I’ve spoken to her and realized that she is ready for the mastermind now, I’ve come to learn that it really wasn’t the right time for her and it really wasn’t the right group for her. And now is the time and the group for her. And the thing is, it was more about me than her. That feeling, I was telling myself, oh, I’m disappointed on her behalf, was really about me not getting her in the mastermind. It not being a win for me. And I just didn’t want to admit that at the time. And now I’m coming to realize, oh, my gosh, this was about me. How did you do this, Heather? When you keep telling everybody else, it’s not about you, it’s about the client. It’s not about you, it’s them. Right?

[00:16:17] So something I’ve realized is that we can learn these lessons and we can know them and we can integrate them in many ways. And yet, because our brains are wired in specific ways, because we are human beings, the stuff can pop up, and that’s okay. It’s just important to acknowledge it, to realize it, to be okay with it, so that you can then let it go.

So I’m learning to question, okay, am I making this about me?

[00:16:49] How do I let go of this? Even if I believe I can help now, how do I let go anytime? That’s what I’m learning from the situation. But this happens to me in the future where I’m like, you know what? I’m so disappointed. I really thought this would be great. I think this, they would be, okay, great. Those things can be true. But let’s step back and say, how do I let go of this? Because I’m probably making this about me more than I am about them, and that I don’t want to do.

[00:17:19] Where in your life are you making something more about you than the other person?

[00:17:25] How might you let go and be okay with where you are and be okay and open to a potential future that may or may not happen? Where in your life might this be applied?

Lesson 3: Silence is just as bad as saying the thing you don’t agree with.

[00:17:39] Okay, final lesson, and this is the one that I mentioned at the beginning that you may not want to hear, but you might need to hear it. Silence is often just as bad as saying the horrible thing that maybe you don’t even agree with yet you’re staying silent on because it might not be popular. You don’t want to get out on your skis. You’re not supposed to talk about something like this.

[00:18:01] So specifically, I am talking about what has been going on with the anti Semitism in this world, in this country. I do not agree with it. I think it’s horrific and I wish it would stop.

[00:18:15] And when all of this really got obvious and started, I was kind of quiet at first.

[00:18:22] And I went through a couple of months of really being bothered by that quietness. That was last year. Well, not last year. At the time this comes out, it’s 2025. That was at the end of 2023. By the beginning of 2024, it was driving me insane.

[00:18:41] And I realized my silence is complicit.

[00:18:45] It’s as if I’m supporting the people who are saying the horrible things. And so I stopped and I started speaking more on LinkedIn and I started commenting more on people’s posts, and I started outwardly supporting the people and telling them why I supported them and the things that I thought were wrong. And I’ve had a couple of posts that have said, look, guys, be honest.

[00:19:10] I’ve even recorded a couple of podcasts that are upcoming this month, y’all, talking about things that are hard, that might be politically charged, that maybe not everybody will agree with. I believe very strongly that we’ve got to stop being silent.

We’ve got to talk more openly about the things we believe in. A, it gives people a very clear picture of who you really are, and it attracts the right people to you and repels the wrong people. Okay? But B, most lawyers, we get into this business saying we want to help, saying we want to make the world a better place.

The world will never be a better place if we are silent about the things we think that are wrong in this world. The world will be in never be a better place if we are complicit. And that is what you are doing if you are staying silent.

Utilize your voice for good. Yes, you can do it in a way where you’re not tacky. You can do it in a way where you’re open to listening. You can do it in a way where you’re willing to hear the other side and then talk back to why you believe that’s not the truth, or there’s a better way of looking at it. You can do that in a way that’s still respectful, but do it.

[00:20:28] I feel very strongly about this one. And one of the reasons I do is because we lawyers, we have a responsibility. If you want my own personal opinion, we are looked up to.

[00:20:41] We hold a certain regard in most people’s eyes, and I think we need to take that responsibility more seriously and stay open to listening, but also tell people what we believe and why.

[00:20:58] Now, what I would say to that, though, is that does not mean that you shut off any conversation from the other side. Because I personally also believe that we need to get more opinions out there. We need to get more understanding around where things are coming from, because you can’t change people’s minds for the better. It should not be about, I’m shaming you. You’re horrible. I mean, there is evil out there. I’m not talking about that. But the vast majority of people out there aren’t evil. But they might be ignorant or they might misunderstand, or they might have some ability to be more open. That’s what you’re looking for. Have more conversation, be more clear about where you stand, but also be open and willing to listen to others. These go hand in hand.

[00:21:44] Okay, those were my top lessons from 2024 that I am bringing into and moving forward with in 2025. I would actually love to hear your top lessons too. So in order to do that I am going to put a link in the show notes to my LinkedIn and I would invite you to either direct message me and let me know what your top lesson was or find one of my more recent posts that talk about this specific episode and you can give us your comments there.

What was one of your top lessons from 2024 that you are integrating into your life in 2025? That’s it for today. Bye for now.