#81: Weight Loss and Giving Things Away

81. Weight Loss and Giving Things Away

Have you ever given a quilt away and not been happy with the way the person treated it or given a present at Christmas and been ticked off? Well, guess what? This episode is for you. I’m Dara Tomasson and this is Love Yourself Thin, episode 81, Weight Loss, and Giving Things Away.

All right, I have a very exciting story for you today, and in fact, I really want to hear from you on your experience with not only giving away a quilt, but giving something to someone and them not reciprocating. Now, this could be a physical object, like a quilt or I don’t know, a present, some sort of gift that you went and you spent a lot of money and then you wrapped it and you put a lot of time and effort into it. It could be something like that, or it could even be like giving of your time, like if you babysat for your grandkids and your daughter-in-law didn’t really give you the appreciation or the recognition that you wanted. So this can be something physical or emotional. Now this podcast is gonna be really, really helpful.

Just before I go into it, I do wanna remind you that there are worksheets for every podcast. I was a school teacher for 10 years, and I taught quilting for so many years, and I love having a structure for my brain. And so when I’m creating these podcasts for you, I put a lot of time and effort into them because I know how precious our time is. Time is a limited commodity. Only have so much time every single day, and so for you to be spending your time listening to my podcast, I appreciate that so much. I want you to get the most out of my podcast and for me and my experience when you can actually not just be a passive listener, but be an active listener and engaging with it.

That’s when you get so more transformation. So that is why I’ve made the decision to always make a handout and I personally make these handouts and they’re so much fun. So if I piqued your interest, I’m glad because I recently had an experience where it kind of rocked me to my core of my beliefs on giving things away. And it gave me a lot of insight into the tool that I’m gonna be sharing in this podcast. And you’ll see in the handout that I have, the place in there indicated where the tool is.

So normally at the beginning of every podcast I share a client win. Well, today I’m actually gonna share my own win, and we’re just gonna get right into the episode. So what you can expect from this episode is you’re gonna learn the tool called the manual that I’m gonna be teaching. You can also expect that you will know what are the things you can control in your life and the things that you can’t. And instead of having a manual that you’re not super proud of, I’m gonna help you create a manual for situations where when you give something to someone, your time or something that you’ve made, then you can now be prepared for whatever outcome comes and you’re not going to turn to the food or turn to over consuming to try to deal with it. Because if you’re anyone like me, when someone has wronged you, you have felt like someone has wronged you and you’ve felt like they have disrespected you, or if you felt like they didn’t adhere to the rules, then what do we usually do? We go in the car and we go to Dairy Queen, or we go to the grocery store, or we go down to the kitchen and either make chocolate chip cookies or we eat a bunch of stuff. Or maybe we go and buy a bunch of fabric and we have thoughts like I’ll show them, they can’t treat me like this. But the problem is now we’ve just over consumed food, or we’ve over consumed social media, or we’ve over consumed shopping and we actually are the ones who are paying the price. And that other person actually has no clue that you are hurting. And so you truly are just hurting yourself. And I wanna put a stop to that.

So that is why I’ve created this podcast. Now let me tell you the situation. I will not say the names of people just because I don’t want to, that’s not the point. But I’m gonna share a story that happened to me just this past week. So a while back I was really struggling with some personal issues and I needed some help and so I reached out to some, people that I admired and then I was able to have an experience where I was able to get the help that I needed. And I just really, really appreciated having this help. And I thought, how can I really show this person how much I appreciate everything that they have done for me? And so in my mind as a quilter, one of the greatest ways that I can show appreciation is by making a quilt for somebody.

And you know, all of you, I’m super curious about all of you, like, what is your origin story? Like, why did you, why did you take up quilting? Because some people think it’s the craziest thing ever. They’re like, you take perfectly good fabric and you like cut it up and put it back together. And it just seems like such a waste of time and energy. Like, if you don’t understand the craft or the allure of it of course it doesn’t make sense. So we also have to remember that. The other day someone actually messaged me, they’re like, how much would it cost for you to make me a king size quilt? And I was like do you really want to know? Like to make a king size quilt, even if I just quilted one, like if I used two king size sheets, just the amount of time it took to like put it on my long arm and quilt it and then, you know, trim it up and put the binding on, even then, that would take so much time. Anyways, I digress. So we know as quilters, we armer. How much time, how much effort, but to the regular person who has no clue, like they really have no idea how long, they don’t know how much fabric is, they don’t know how much batting is, they don’t know how much it costs to get a long armer. If you’re getting someone to quilt it for you, they have no idea how or if you quilted it yourself. They don’t know anything about basting and quilting. They know nothing.

Just like a little kid, you know, when my kids were really little, I would just wrap up things that they already had, and I still, to this day, I go to thrift stores and I find things for my kids. For me, it’s so much fun just watching their faces and so anyways, everyone has their different ideas. I get it and I respect that. But I’m just prefacing my story that not a lot of people have any idea, and the fact, even if they did this is what’s gonna be so fun. So anyways, I give this quilt and I write this really lovely label and I am really terrible with labels. So it was like a big deal for me to like make a label, to write the label, to hand stitch the label, and then to get the quilt to this person was also a bit of an ordeal. And I just felt really good about being able to do that and it was a very special quilt. It was actually in one of my books and there was a lot of significance to how unique it was for the person.

So that was almost a year ago and just last week, I’m just on my Instagram and this person messages me and says “you don’t know me, but I found a quilt that you made for somebody and it’s for sale, and I thought you might want it back.” And I was like, what is going on? So apparently thrift stores have come a long way. And so the certain area thrift store, they take things that they think are of greater value and they have an auction. And so they take the pictures of these items and they put them up for auction and then people put bids on them and they have a minimum bid. And so sure enough, she sent me the link and there is the quilt that I made for this person with the label, with the person’s name on it, with my name on it, and quite a personal message. And when I saw that at the beginning, it was like the most shame, like it was like a searing hot shame that went through my body.

And the first thought that came to me was my quilt wasn’t good enough for her, she rejected like, my offering . And it wasn’t good enough for her. I felt this shame and I just allowed it to be there. I didn’t resist it. I didn’t say, no, Dara, you know? No. I just said, oh, yeah that’s a crazy thought. And then my thought went, my next thought was, well, I gave it to her and she could decide what she wants to do with it. And then I was like, yeah, and then I was kind of bummed. I had the thought. Huh, that’s a drag. Like I kind of thought that, you know, she would really enjoy that and I could picture her using that quilt when they were having like a movie night or something, and I thought it would like look cool in her house. And then I realized, yeah, but I gave it to her. And it was interesting to go from the we talk about the emotional scale in Love Yourself Thin, from like disgust or shame, like these really heavy, dark kind of emotions. And then, I always think of it as, you know, when you were a kid and you had the number line maybe on your desk, I used to have that, and so it was like the negative numbers, and then you went to zero and zero was neutral, and then you went on the number line to positive.

And that’s kind of how I talk about the emotional scale in my program and, and lots of like psychologists and all of that, there’s this whole emotional guidance scale and all of these things. And it was almost like I talked to you all about like cartoons, you know, in cartoons when they have like the speech bubbles. I had all of these thought bubbles and it was so fascinating because I’m sitting on the couch and I’m being an observer of all my thoughts. And of course we know that our emotions come from our thoughts. So I’m having all these different emotions because I’m having all these different thoughts. I went from I’m not good enough, even my quilt wasn’t good enough, that was in a book, isn’t good enough for this person to, well, I gave it to her and I liked my reasons for giving it to her, and I’m sure that in the moment, and I know that she appreciated it. And then I had the thought like, but just because of that, like it’s up to her to decide if she wants to keep it.

And I did play around for a while and well, I’m gonna get that quilt back. I’m gonna get it back. And, And then I kind of played around with well, it’s kinda like the cat that came back or those, you know, the home alone or home abound or whatever movie that was… my kids used to, we used to watch together, but those little, there was like two dogs and a cat, their family moved and they went across the country and found their families. And so I kind of played with that idea and I, I even called the thrift store and talked to them and they gave me a number and I called the number a few times and it never worked. And then I went on the website and there was five people that already put a bid on the quilt. And then I had the thought like, do I really need it back? And then I was like, well, maybe I should just tell them to take the label off. And so this is all, these are all the thoughts that are just going through my head and I’m just watching them. I’m just letting them be there and I’m allowing myself to like experience the whole thing. And then I was going to put a bid on it, and then I realized, you know, I have more of that fabric and I’m the one who wrote the pattern. So do I actually need that quilt back? No. And the funny part was the person I gave the quilt to, had, she had talked at some point in her business, she talked about decluttering, and she gave the example of like, if your grandma gave a quilt to you, is it a good idea just to have it in a cupboard forever or put it back in the world so other people can enjoy it?

And I thought about it and I thought, well, yeah I mean, that’s kind of fun. And I don’t know how much it went for, and I don’t know how any more bids were put on it, but I thought, isn’t that fun? That my quilt can keep living in other people’s homes and I have no idea where it’s gonna go and what’s gonna happen to it. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Okay, so as I’m sharing this story, I want to teach you this concept, and I wanna help you understand that, like anytime we buy like a sewing machine or even anything now, it’s like there’s always instructions that come with everything. And so that’s called the manual, that’s the operating manual. Now we all have our own operating manual. So when I was growing up and probably even before… Well definitely as I learned life coaching skills and tools, this like made such a world of difference for me because I actually had a manual for how people are supposed to behave and if they didn’t behave a certain way, then it was devastating. And it was interesting to me, I noticed this with my mother-in-law because she has a very strong manual about being late and when I grew up in a family of six kids and then when, as we all became young adults and we’d have these family dinners, it was very interesting because we would say dinner would be at a certain time and we generally would start dinner at that time. But if for some reason one of my siblings couldn’t come on time or they were late, it actually wasn’t that big of a deal. Like we didn’t make a big deal of it at all. There was never really any pressure around, it’s two o’clock, we need to start dinner. Like, where are they? There was never any of that. It would be kind of annoying if they were supposed to bring something and they didn’t.

So like, I remember like one of my brothers, it was always the joke, like he brought the buns or the rolls and so it’s like sometimes we’d have them for dessert or, you know, or the next day if there was leftover meat. Right? And it was, it wasn’t a big deal growing up. It wasn’t a big deal for us because we were just really glad that they came and that was just our culture. And then I got married and my mother-in-law is very much like that is a huge issue. Being on time is a really, really big deal. And if you are not on time, it is absolutely rude. It is disrespectful. It’s a slap in the face. And it was fascinating to me because I remember one time we were going there for dinner and I had two little babies, my two babies, my first two kids are 20 months apart. And you know how things go. I’m doing my best. And then there was a diaper change. And then my husband got home a little bit later and so I think we were like seven minutes late and there was like a blow up kind of about it because there’s just so much pressure at their house about being on time. They make it mean so much. And then there’s nothing wrong with that. Like everyone’s allowed to have their own manual. But the problem that happens is that if you are judging other people by your manual, then you are not gonna be happy. ironically, I gave a quilt to my brother-in-law and then he moved overseas. And so that quilt that I gave him for his wedding, actually was in my mother-in-law’s closet. I’m like sharing all these family things. And I mean, for him it was like, he’s like, okay, whenever I get back I’ll have that quilt. And for me, I remember, this is years and years ago, how offended I was, I thought, well, he couldn’t even have the decency to put that quilt in his suitcase. But I’m the one who is paying the price. I’m the one who is upset. Whereas he’s thinking, well, when I come back there’s this beautiful quilt waiting for me. Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe he’s like, mom, you could tell his mom just to give it away, or, I don’t know. Because this is the thing, when we give a quilt, we give it.

So this is the little exercise I wanna do with you. For this podcast because I actually have coached people on this and working at the quilt shop and quilting for people, and just being a life coach for quilters, this comes up every once in a while and I wanna give you some tools to help you so that you won’t feel so discouraged or frustrated or even like just setting yourself up for failure.

Okay, so this is how we’re gonna structure it. What are the things you can control and what are the things that you cannot control? The things you can control are your reasons for giving the quilt away. And so I like to think, what was your intention of this quilt? So was the intention to get a whole bunch of praise and to have the quilt displayed and to have people talk about it all over the place and to draw attention to it? Or was the intention to say, Hey, this is my way of showing love to you. Now, when I was a single adult and even like when I, I remember the first quilt I ever tied was, I was 12 years old and there was ladies at church that were having babies. And so we tied these quilts and I just thought that was the greatest thing ever. And my grandmas were quilters. I would say they were like social quilters, like the quilting bee and all of that. And they grew up in small towns, and so when people got married or when there was a baby, quite often these women would get together and say, Hey, let’s work on this quilt for this young woman or this new mom. And so you can control your reasons for making the quilt. You can control how much money you spend on the quilt. You can control how much time you spend on making the quilt. You can control your own reasons why you gave the quilt, and you can control if you like your reasons. You can control all of that.

Okay, so in your manual, in your operating manual, you say, I make quilts for people because I love them. It is my way of showing the love, and so when I had roommates or people that I really, really cared about, I would make a quilt for them. It just seemed to me like, this is just what I do. This is the Dara way. And I didn’t have my long arm then, so I tied a lot of quilts. I figured it out. I did pay a few long armers to quilt some quilts, and I just appreciated that, it was like, this is just in my integrity of like who I wanna be. If you’re really important to me, I’m gonna make you a quilt. I hope that you’ll like it. I hope that you will enjoy it. And that is what it is. So you get to decide what you control. You get to decide your intention.

Now, once you give that quilt away, they get to decide what they want to do with the quilt. So if they want to throw it away, they get to. If they want to give it away, they get to. If they want to use it for a paint drop cloth, they get to. If they wanna use it for a dog bed, they can. If they wanna use it for the back of the car for picnics or for soccer games, they get to. If they wanna just put it on a shelf and put it in like a bag they get to. If they want to never use it, that’s up to them. And so they get to decide what they wanna do. And so what My goal here for you is to find peace, to make peace with whatever they decide to do. And so let’s just back up for a second, if that person throws away the quilt, or if that person uses the dog bed, you do have a choice to say, Hey, listen, my intention of this quilt was for you to show a little bit more respect for it and it actually is discouraging to me that you would treat something that I created for you. I’m not sure if you realize that, you know, it was 20 hours of work or whatever. Like you can, you could totally say that. And you could also say like, I’m actually not gonna make you any more quilts if this is what it’s gonna be, because for me, I expected something else. Or even in the giving of the quilt, you could even say, hey, this quilt was a big effort and it was this, and I would hope that you would this, this, and this. But again, people do not come with remote controls. You cannot control anybody. But you can control your thoughts and how you want to react to it.

So this is your homework for today. I want you to think, if I gave a quilt to someone and they put it on the shelf, what would I do? Would I talk to them about it? Would I say, Hey, are you worried about using that quilt? I remember my husband’s aunt was given a quilt and she was so worried about it. She was like, I don’t know how to wash it. It feels so stiff. I just put it here. And she was afraid of it. And so I thought, well, you know what? The next time I give a quilt to someone, I’m gonna give them washing instructions. I’m gonna share with them, oh, this is what you do. This is how you care for a quilt. Also, my brother-in-law has these incredible, incredible quilts that his grandma made and she was an absolutely fantastic quilter. And she, I would say, I mean her stitches per inch were impressive. And she told him when she gave him the quilts, I want you to use these quilts. I do not want them sitting on a shelf. I want your kids to be snuggled into them when they’re watching movies. I want them on your beds. I want you washing them. I want you using them.

Okay. So sometimes when I go to their house, I freak out cause I’m like, oh, we need to preserve this. And I think, no, no, no. That was her wish. Her wish was to use this. So I want you to go through all the different scenarios of if they threw it away or if they, if they gave it away, or if they use it at the dog bed, or if they use it as a paint drop cloth. And I want you to decide how you will deal with it. Because one of the problems that we have, and this happens in families, this happens with friends, is that we don’t always speak our truth.

And one of the things that I’m seeing more and more in my program and with my clients, my one-on-one clients over the last, you know, three years or so, is that they are healing their thyroid, and their thyroid, a lot of us struggle with our thyroid because, our thyroid senses when we don’t tell our truth or when we sugarcoat what we’re saying. And earaches even happen with this, if we don’t say what we wanna say, we have throat and ear problems because our vibrations are physically affecting us. Because if we’re not saying our truth, if we’re not speaking that our bodies sense that and they say, Hey, hold on. Slow down. We’re not being truthful here. And so a lot of the women that I work with, they actually reduce their thyroid medication and some of them even get off of it because they really are starting to learn the truth.

And even for me, if I’m holding my tongue, if I’m not saying it, what I wanna say, like if my husband is maybe not in the best… I’m like, I really wanna say it to him, but I just don’t know how to say it and I don’t wanna hurt his feelings or whatever. I can feel the burning in the back of my neck, it goes into my ears. I’m so sensitive to that now because I have learned to, how to speak my truth. And you can go back to that, my podcast on having difficult conversations with Jodi Moore that was really, really helpful for me to learn how to say, Hey, I don’t know how to say this but… And I might flub up, but I just need to tell you how, where I’m coming from, because otherwise I feel like I’m just gonna burst.

Like that is definitely something you could say because even with the scenario, like even with my mother-in-law and the quilt that I gave to my brother-in-law, I could say, you know, I’ve noticed that quilts been in the closet for five years and it makes me kind of sad. And I know that I gave it to him, but there’s a piece of me that just feels like I don’t know if he realizes it was something I wanted him to use and it was like really expensive and I just don’t know if he like sees the value in it and it just kind of makes me sad. And I’m just wondering like if you have any thoughts about it, like do you see what I mean about, like that would be just a way of saying, Hey, let’s talk about this thing. Let’s see here, what’s going on.

Because the problem is we don’t wanna have resentment. And the other issue is this puts wedges in our relationships with people. And there’s been times where, you know, like I’ve given a gift or someone expected something and then they didn’t get it, and so then they feel animosity or they feel resentment or they feel unappreciated and we don’t want that, right? We wanna have genuine, open, loving relationships and until we actually write down what our manual is, and we go Oh, oh, I had no idea. Kind of going back to the example of being late for dinner. The manual in my family growing up was whenever you come we’d love to have you, but my husband grew up in a home very, very different. And that was their manual. And there’s nothing wrong with it, but unless I knew it, right? It’s like speaking a different language, then I wouldn’t be able to communicate properly.

All right. I hope this episode was so helpful for you. I’m actually so grateful that I had that experience recently. And in fact what I did was I actually contacted my very first life coach that I met in 2018, and I told her, and I just shared with her like how much I appreciate her and How very different I am and how much more free I feel. Ugh, I’m getting a little emotional here because in the past if I hadn’t had those transformations, if I didn’t have those thought tools, I would’ve been devastated. I would’ve felt like the biggest failure in the world, I would’ve made her giving that quilt away mean that I wasn’t good enough, and that it just proved that it’s true. I’m not good enough. And I honestly don’t feel that way at all, and I’m just so grateful that I have these mind tools to help me. I feel so liberated and it is the greatest feeling.

So I just messaged her and we had this great conversation about how growth is just so exciting, and that’s what happens in our group, in Love Yourself Thin, in our membership. It’s just so much fun watching these women, we have three calls a week and we share three wins every day, and it’s just so much fun to watch them learn to love themselves, learn to appreciate themselves, and learn to really embrace that they can totally change and they don’t have to be stuck anymore.

All right, so if that is something that you want in your life, I’m gonna invite you to come to… actually, I have a really fun challenge on my YouTube channel. I don’t even know if, you know, I have a YouTube channel and it’s gonna be linked in the show notes. And the title of the challenge that I have, I’m gonna be in there every week for the year, and it’s called Liberate with Dara in your body and mind. And in January we worked on cleaning up your space and getting organized. And then February is waste is a treasure, how we’re going to use it and show love to others. So we are gonna make dog beds for the local shelter or cat beds with our fabric scraps and our batting scraps. So make sure you save all of those. In March we’re gonna start working on our quilt coats. And in fact, we’re gonna be working on quilt coats for about five months or so in the YouTube because I want you to learn how to reclaim old quilts and make them into garments for yourself or for others in the body that you have, and in really embracing your body, it’s gonna be really, really fun.

So you can go to my YouTube channel and you can download, there’s the Year Challenge. And then another one I have as of my Facebook group, I have a free Facebook group. It’s called Liberate Mental and Physical Weight Loss and I have monthly prompts in there. And I will also be connected because I want you to get a flavor. I wanna give you support and just to kind of see what happens when you use your mind to create the life that you want. And if there’s anything that you want coaching with or you need help with, I do have like those coveted spots on my calendar. And I want to meet with you during the week and I can give you some coaching on whatever you’re really struggling with, and then we can have a conversation to see if Love Yourself Thin is a good fit for you. You might be thinking that sounds really scary, but I promise you the feedback that I get from all the women from those consults is that it’s super, super helpful and they always feel really, really good and so much relief after the call. So you have an amazing day and remember to love yourself thin. Take care.