The incredible Michelle Keil shares her beautiful love and relationship insights~
Welcome to Lovin My Daughter-in-law podcast. I’m relationship expert and master certified coach LeAnn Austin. I’ll help you create more connection, love, and fun with others, yourself, and your daughter-in-law.
Hey y’all, welcome to Lovin My Daughter-in-law, episode #164: Humility with Michelle Keil
I love observing and connecting with other humans, especially noting how they fill and implement love into their lives and their relationships.
We have the amazing Michelle sharing some beautiful love and relationship insights with us today. All right, Michelle, tell us a little bit about you.
Well, like you said, my name is Michelle Keil. I refer to myself as a newly empty nesting wife and mom to six plus two kids. Six kids that we’ve raised and two that chose our family through marriage. And so we love them as well. We live in Gilbert, Arizona. I recently finished a master coach certification and an advanced certification in motherhood and family life.
And I jokingly say that I help women hate themselves less. But the pretty version of that is that I help women improve their physical and mental health in small doable steps using lots of modalities; emotion work, nervous system awareness, action strategies, and creativity and doodling to reach more peace within themselves.
I love that so, so, so much. Doodling is a new thing I’ve just learned about from Leah and oh my goodness, that is changing my life. So I am trying to be more intentional about doodling, but that is something I’m still resistant to. So I love that you’re teaching that. That’s awesome.
All right, so how do you incorporate love into your business and life, and how does that impact your relationships?
I think, you know, it is important to recognize that this is actually a challenging piece, right? That incorporating love, for whatever reason, we have been taught that love is not as strong a motivator as, you know, fear or anger or determination even. But that seeing that love, like I can hold that love for my clients no problem. I can hold that love for people outside of my family and even in my family.
Sometimes the hardest person that it is to hold that love for is for myself and that’s the bigger challenge. Just recognizing that and getting curious about why that is and as I learn and grow and develop that love within and for myself, that spills out, you know, on to all of the other areas of my life and my business.
I, you know, love the women that I work with in my business and and don’t think that they need to fix anything. They’re not broken, and they may or may not agree with me sometimes but I think, you know, the fuel that we do certain things from, right, whether it’s within relationship or within just our own relationship with goals and things that we want to achieve if the fuel is from a place of lack, then it’s a much different experience than if it’s from a place of love and growth and desire.
Like I want to develop this relationship with my spouse. I want to develop this relationship with my children, not because I think this needs to change, but because I love them and I want to connect with them. .
That’so beautiful. And I love how you brought the self-love into it because when we do have that compassion and love for ourselves, it makes it so much easier to love other people and to care for them. I think sometimes we don’t realize the impact that has, but when we’re beating ourselves up, it makes it easier to find judgment for others versus, you know, just that compassionate love for ourselves. And then like you said, it overflows. It just keeps going. It’s beautiful. So I love it.
All right. Yes, exactly, so what is something that you love about you and why?
This is a more challenging question, but as we’re developing, right, that love for self, I love that I am willing to learn. And I love that I want to continue to grow, and I love that over the past number of years, the reason for that has changed, again from that place of not enoughness to, I wonder what’s possible for me.
What if we just tried this? It might not work out, and that’s okay. What if it is possible? So I love that I am willing to do that and I am loving and appreciating the fact that I can show that to my children, even at, you know, my old age of almost 55 this year.
Yeah, that it’s never too late to continue doing that or to start doing it in a different way. Yes, that’s so beautiful. I love that, Michelle. Awesome. Okay, so you know that I love talking about connection with others and ourselves. And I think the daughter-in-law, mother-in-law relationship is packed full of examples to learn from. So any thoughts that you have about either having a daughter-in-law or being a daughter-in-law?
Well, I’ve been a daughter-in-law much longer than I’ve had a daughter-in-law. But unfortunately my in-laws have passed away, but they were great examples to me of always accepting me. And even when they didn’t want to, maybe when we first were married, my husband and I lived in what we jokingly referred to as the Keil compound.
So he is the youngest of five siblings and they owned two triplexes that shared parking. And his parents lived in one apartment, his grandparents lived in a second apartment, and my husband and I lived between the two of them, across from his parents and upstairs from his grandparents. And then his three sisters lived with their families in the three apartments across from us. And his brother lived about two miles away. Wow. Yeah.
And so we were newlyweds, not even married for about two years at the time. And this is in Northern California. And I’m like, we can either live in California or have kids, but we can’t afford to do both. So where are we moving? So we jokingly say that I’m the one that broke up the Keil compound.
We moved to Arizona and within five years, his parents, grandparents, and two of his sisters had moved to Arizona as well. So I’m like, yeah, I may have broken it up, but it’s still intact. And so I love that with my family of in-laws.
And at the same time, you know, our daughter-in-law, we have a son-in-law, and I think they’re similar in ways that, we just decided long ago that if you are willing to love our children, we are willing to love you. And we want that to be a thing that I was modeled that with my own parents as well. They don’t even refer to our spouses as in-laws. They just call them sons and daughters. I love that.
And so, with our son-in-law and our daughter-in-law, just loving them where they’re at and what the vision that they have for their lives, and it’s fun. It’s harder, our daughter and son-in-law live in Florida, which is far away from us and we miss them. We’re excited about the things that they’re doing and growing and developing.
With our son and his wife, they live about 10 minutes from us, and so that’s fun as well. She and I will go running together two or three times a week and do races together. And so it’s a lot of fun. And it’s been fun to develop those relationships.
I love that you’re so intentional about just loving them right where they’re at. That’s so beautiful and whatever’s going on and taking opportunities when you can to run and whatever. I love that so much. I’ve been able to run with my daughter-in-law now and then, and that is so connecting. I love that. Yeah, it’s so fun. Yeah, that’s awesome. All right. So anything else you’d like to share and where can our audience go to find out more about you?
You can find me. I have a website: Michelle Keil Coaching. Keil is spelled differently than it sounds. It’s K E I L. And then you can find me on Facebook and Instagram just at Michelle Kyle coaching and I’m on Pinterest, but I think I only have like three things here, but we’ll add this podcast to it eventually. And I’ll put that all in the show notes too. Yeah and if they would love to connect, I love to continue the conversation of, you know, just how to develop that love for yourself and it can be through physical and mental improvement of health, and they’re so interconnected, and finding out ways that it is even more connected than we think.
For sure. I love that. Ah, that’s beautiful. All right. Well, what is your favorite quote about love, and how have you used it for yourself and in your relationships?
So, this may not sound like it has to do with love, but my favorite quote is from C. S. Lewis, and he says that: “true humility is not thinking less of yourself, but it’s thinking about yourself less.”
And so for me, humility and love didn’t seem to go hand in hand, because if I love myself, then I was proud of all the things that I was doing, then that’s not very humble of Or, I couldn’t not compare myself to someone else and see where they’re at and think I should be there or what are they thinking about where I’m at.
But as we learn and grow and develop that love for ourselves, then we can actually learn and grow. And develop that humility, that true humility, where I’m not worried about what other people are thinking about me, and I don’t have to think about what they’re thinking while I’m doing something. If I’m good with myself, I can spend so much more time thinking about other people around me. And I can appreciate that I have gifts and talents and I have flaws and things that I would like to change. And all of that is okay. And I don’t need to fixate on those things. I can spend so much more time thinking about others and sharing that love with them.
Oh, true humility. Hmm, something to think about. I love that so much. Thank you for sharing that, Michelle. Sure loved your insights and your wisdom and sure appreciate you being here with us today. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been so fun. I love it. And I love all the good you’re doing. Ah, well, you the same. Thank you friend.
All right. Here’s to humility, connection, learning, and love. Have a good one, y’all.
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