#3 - Life Isn’t a Bowl of Lucky Charms Marshmallows

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

marshmallow, cereal, lucky charms, lucky charms cereal, life, bits, bowl, party, kid, thought, pieces, trisha, friends, noise, oat, feel, fished, advertised, colored, balance

SPEAKERS

Trisha Barita

00:02

Hey there, I'm Trisha Barita. I'm a mother of twin girls, a wife, an entrepreneur, a psychology major, a lawyer, and a coach. With all these different roles in my life, in the past, I truly struggled with limiting beliefs in my ability to adequately juggle all these roles successfully, I often would be frustrated that time and again, I let my goals and dreams always take a backseat to everything else I was trying to do. And those dreams always seem to be on the horizon, just out of reach. Until I discovered tools and thought work to help me tackle and learn to balance all of it. Now, I don't let these titles define my limits. I define my balance in life by how I choose to show up for myself every day. Am I perfect? Hell, no, far from it. But I do work every day to believe in myself and to be present with whatever I experienced in this life, The Good, the Bad, and The Really Fucking Ugly. To own my truth and own my thoughts. I created this podcast to talk about how that noise gets in the way of our goals as women. And now I help women and teach them tools to cut the overwhelm of noise in their life, preventing them from getting the balance they want. If you like this podcast and want to take my free course to get started on designing your balance, and saying fuck that noise, go to TrishaBarita.com/freecourse. Now let's get after it.

02:08

Hello, fabulous friends. So in the last podcast episode, I mentioned life isn't a bowl of the fucking marshmallows from Lucky Charms. And I wanted to expand on that thought just a little bit here. So I personally am not, like, the biggest cereal eater. I grew up with all the boring cereals. And when I say boring, I mean boring as a kid and probably low- to no-sugar is the right word. And no cute cartoon advertising kind of cereal. I had to go to , uh, friends houses to snag like the really good cereals like Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Cocoa Puffs, Cocoa Krispies. Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes, Fruity Pebbles, Captain Crunch. Oh, and then Captain Crunch with berries. Let's see Reese's Pieces Puffs, Trix, Cookie Crisp. Oh, and on that last one, Cookie Crisps--I'm pretty sure and that was never cereal. That's just cookies in a bowl. It was awesome. Especially when I was a kid. You know . . . the ones that they teased on Saturday morning cartoons back in the day, or probably on YouTube Kid TV now.

03:27

Anyhow, my parents said they didn't have a lot of sugar-type cereals in the house. And above all those tasty breakfast treats I just listed, there is the infamous Lucky Charms cereal. And if you're not familiar, or you don't recall, this is the cereal with a bunch of regular cereal pieces--they call them crunchy oat cereal pieces--mixed in with these, like, colorful shapes like hearts, stars, horseshoes, clovers, blue moons, unicorns and rainbows that are all, like, these like mini-marshmallows. All advertised by a cute leprechaun named Lucky, who I think gets, like, his magical powers from the marshmallow pieces in the advertising.

04:16

Okay, so . . .so being a psych major, sometimes I do think about the experiments of life. And I can think of no other ridiculous experiment than placing a huge clear bowl of Lucky Charms out at a St. Patrick's Day party to see who eats only the marshmallows out of the bowl, and leaves the plain cereal bits. Well, if you've never done this, let me tell you how this goes. So for years and years, I threw St. Patrick's Day party, family-friendly, even before I had kids. I would build, like, fun leprechaun traps. Umm, we would face-paint shamrocks and pots of gold on everybody and decorate green everywhere. And I'd play Irish music my dad used to play for me.

05:10

And one year I read somewhere to put out Lucky Charms to go with your, like, St. Patrick's Day party theme. So I thought, well, that's kind of clever. So I did it. And my party--the the party that we would have--it would usually start around like 3pm in the afternoon and go into late. And--when you're--I put out this this, of course, big glass clear bowl full of Lucky Charms cereal. And do you know what I discovered the next morning? The bowl would be left with all the normal cereal oat bits and the magical marshmallow pieces would be gone. I mean, all gone. Like some sad person really fished for those last marshmallow bits. And you may be thinking, Trisha, I don't really care about your silly Lucky Charms marshmallow St. Patrick's Day party experiment. But wait, wait, wait, wait. I have a broader theory going on here.

06:07

So just go with this for a minute. Go with me. Okay, so year after year this happened at this party. And so sometimes I would, like, stand in the kitchen in the middle of the party and just watch. And, and people would even tease other people about only taking the marshmallows, but they still did it anyway. Even we had like this marshmallow shame. And I--and I watched with, like, full amusement as they all, one by one mostly grown adults, but the kids, too, would fish out the marshmallows from the bowl with a spoon leaving the regular non-marshmallow parts of the Lucky Charms cereal. See, that's why I put it in a clear bowl--because they could see those colored marshmallows on the sides were still in there begging to be eaten.

06:56

Oh, anyway, during the party, even every once in a while, a mom would come in to make a plate, like, for her toddler, and would, like, scoop all the cereal--the marshmallows and the regular bits--onto a plate and take it over to, like, a nearby table with the, with the toddler, where I would then proceed to watch the toddler pick out all of the colored marshmallow bits leaving the plain cereal oat bits. And don't you worry about my friends. They all knew! This was a running joke, and they still fished out the marshmallows. They just couldn't help themselves.

07:33

So where am I going with all this? Besides making you nostaligic to buy some Lucky Charms? I think, in theory, if you asked and some of them I did ask, and most of them said, and what would probably say, they picked out the marshmallow bits because they taste better and it feels good. Whereas the plain cereal oat bits didn't taste as good as the marshmallows. And you're probably thinking, duh, Trisha, that's obvious. And I agree. You see, most people may think they want life to feel good all the time, 100% if they could. Isn't that the way life is even advertised to us? Don't feel bad, feel good, right? You know how you can feel good--play this video game, go on this trip, drink this beer, have a glass of wine to relax, eat this food, watch the show, buy this whatever. I think the tagline for Lucky Charms is 'They're magically delicious.' And I'm pretty sure they're talking only about the marshmallow bits.

08:40

Which leads me to, you know, talk about when it doesn't feel good. You know, it's uncomfortable. And we don't like being uncomfortable. So we seek out these hits of false pleasure to try to make it feel 100% good. But life is not like that. It's much more like 50/50--a lot like a bowl of Lucky Charms, or at least according to some Reddit boards. And yes, some people on there took time to measure the marshmallow bits versus the regular bits. And it seemed there was some consensus that they found it mostly to be a one to one ratio 50/50. And, and for some of you crazy cereal-lovers, maybe you do want just a bowl of all the marshmallow bits from the Lucky Charms cereal, and none of the plain oat bits. Look, I get it, believe me, I know you do.

09:37

But in my analogy of marshmallow cereal to real life, that's not really living because you will lean on false pleasures to get there. This thought or idea that you have to feel positive all the time . . . that if you just do certain things, you will live in this super happy positive space where you're never sad, never angry, never frustrated, while you're missing the whole experience of life. For me, I want it to be real. I want to experience it all. I don't want to feel 100% positive peppy all the time.

10:15

I lost a good friend over the summer. He was young--in his 30s. A dad of a young son, and it sucked. And again, I didn't want to feel all peppy and positive. I wanted to miss him. And to feel the sadness that is a part of loss. I don't want to buffer by food or booze or TV or social media, to not feel the loss of my friend in my life or to not experience all the other parts of life. Remember: The Good, the Bad and the Funckin' Ugly. In the past, I would have sought something to numb it and feel that hit of pleasure. Same as if I had, you know, a not-so-great day at work. But it is feeling those feelings, learning to process those thoughts and emotions that are part of life in a healthy way.

11:07

That's where I want to be. That's what I work on with my clients. And the first piece is always realizing it's okay to not be a zombie Stepford wife, rose-colored-glasses person all the time. And you can do it, too, when you allow yourself to just be sometimes a little uncomfortable and experience all the marshmallow and non-marshmallow parts of life. Now go get after it. You got this

11:45

Hey, thanks for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, and are woman ready to say 'Fuck That Noise,' so you can start designing the balance in your life. Go take my free course to get started at TrishaBarita.com/freecourse. Now have an awesome day and I'll see you next week.