Meet today's guest:

Betsy Chasse

is an award winning filmmaker (What The Bleep Do We Know?!, Song of the New Earth, Pregnant In America, The Empty Womb) and a best-selling author (Tipping Sacred Cows, It Came Out of My Vagina, Now What?, Dancing In The Unknown) You can watch her series Radical Dating on www.alrightnow.com and learn more about her at www.betsychasse.net

This week my guest is Betsy Chasse, a mom with a wonderful sense of humour and a strong connection to what's really important in life.

I've shared a few of the highlights from our conversation below, but be sure tolisten to the podcast to enjoy all the goods.

The humanness of judgment

Judgment is part of how our brains work… What happens is your brain attaches meaning to everything… including I like this or I don't like this. And that's where judgment comes from. Because our brains work this way, judgment is a natural thing to do and we don't even know we're doing it. This is a human problem because then we start judging ourselves.

We are constantly being bombarded with judgment and we are putting out judgment and how often you judge is a big thing to get some awareness around for yourself… because [once you are aware] you can sort of slow that down a little bit.

Make room for you

It's amazing to me that most of us, especially women, take until our 40's before we realize, wait a minute…I can just say, No, to this person.

Get really clear on the answers to these questions: What is it that I want? Why do I want it? What is it going to give me or what does it mean to me?

It's hard to say no because we're afraid we're going to hurt someone's feelings or we don't believe that we deserve what we want and once you start to get really clear on those questions… then you can get really clear on what you don't want…or what you have to say no to, to make it happen. Then that becomes really easy and you can do it without the guilt of letting them down.

Getting to know myself and getting to know my values and what was important to me, and then being able to say, you know what I'm allowed to have what I want and, if what I want requires me to say No to somebody else as long as I'm not mean about it – if I do it with compassion are respect – then that's okay.

Saying No to kids

Instead of saying no to my kids I ask them the same questions – why do you want it, why is it important to you, etc., because what I've found is most of the time, they aren't automatically thinking of the value of it to them.

Envisioning what you really want

We've been programmed to look at life as a collection device – you're supposed to get a house, a car, a family, a dog …like a video game – going through the mazes until we collect all the items. So I let that go and decided to focus on what kind of experiences I want to have in my life. This allows you to open up to possibility because there is often a lot of ways to experience [what you want] that don't involve what you originally thought you needed to have.

Great questions to ask: What's the experience I'm looking for? How am I not getting it in my life right now? What could I do in this moment to have that?

Being a perfect mom

I have 2 kids and I realized relatively early on with my daughter that I needed to be okay with being a terrible mother.

As my kids got older (about 4 years old) I would have a situation that I handled badly and I would go back to her and say, You know I handled that badly. I reacted from a really emotional place of frustration or anger and I apologize for that.

She got to realize that mom is not perfect, so I don't have to be perfect either and it chills us all out.

Be present with your kid and when you're present and with them they are going to lead you more than you need to lead them and that's a powerful place to be.

Get to the place where you can have a lot of acceptance and patience for yourself, nobody is standing there saying here's how you do this moment with your kid.

Most of what's going with us as moms is fear – afraid that we're going to damage these little beings and we're shocked that we've been given this responsibility of raising children. So there is a constant fear that you're going to make a mistake.

In Tipping Sacred Cows I have this game called, My Life Sucks, that helps you get familiar with all the reasons you think your failing as a mom…and it's almost hilarious because then you look at your life and realize there's all this other stuff that's really amazing.