227 - Pick Your Battles: Strengthening Discernment to Manage Triggers | Life Happens the Podcast
Life Happens with Barb & Michelle
Michelle Maros & Barb Schmidt
4.9 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 14 October 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
You don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to. 💭
In this week’s episode of Life Happens with Barb & Michelle, we’re diving into how to protect your peace by picking your battles, knowing your triggers, setting boundaries, and loving people from afar.
We continue our conversation on navigating disrespect and difficult interactions by strengthening your discernment muscle. Barb and Michelle share personal stories, practical tools, and compassionate strategies to help you manage conflict without losing your inner calm.
💬 In this episode:
- Barb opens up about lessons learned when she was triggered and crossed her own boundaries after divorce—and how she now practices loving people from afar.
- Michelle shares her mindset shift from being hard on herself for mistakes to embracing life as a laboratory for growth and learning.
✨ Episode Highlights
- Don’t test yourself: Keep honoring your boundaries, even when you feel confident in your healing. Boundaries are meant to protect your peace.
- Develop a relationship with yourself: Balance compassion and accountability. Love yourself enough to grow through the hard things.
- Pick your battles: Be wise about what deserves your time, energy, and attention—you don’t have to attend every argument you’re invited to.
- Know your triggers: Be aware of the areas where you’re vulnerable and communicate boundaries to protect your peace.
From recognizing your triggers to communicating with intention, this episode will help you preserve your mental health, stay rooted in your values, and engage only in the battles that truly matter.
📖 Michelle’s new book — Dear Friend — is now available for pre-order!
Filled with 365 reflections, it’s your daily companion for cultivating self-love, clarity, and inner peace.
👉 Pre-order your copy here: https://amzn.to/3Us9eqg
💛 Episode Topics:
- Outer peace begins with inner peace
- Knowing is this worth your time, energy, and efforts
- Setting and Maintaining boundaries
- Loving people from afar
- The power of pausing before reacting
💬 We’d love to hear from you! What insight or moment resonated most with you in this episode? Share in the comments—we truly read every one.
📅 Subscribe & Join Us Next Tuesday for another heartfelt episode of Life Happens with Barb and Michelle! 💕
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🎙️ Host by:
- https://www.instagram.com/peaceful_barb/
- https://www.instagram.com/michellemaros/
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Life Happens podcast with Barb and Michelle. We are so thrilled that |
| 0:05.7 | you were back with us this week for another conversation about life's most interesting and meaningful |
| 0:10.1 | topics. If you joined us last week, you'll remember we tackled the topic of disrespect, how we |
| 0:15.5 | manage it, the roots of it, all that good stuff. And so this week we wanted to dive a little deeper and talk more about the |
| 0:24.0 | discernment that comes from picking your battles, when to engage, when to disengage, and where |
| 0:29.4 | to know how to place your energy, especially when in some of these difficult conversations and |
| 0:34.6 | situations that many of us find ourselves in. So I'm excited about this one. |
| 0:39.1 | I hope you are too. Let's get into it. Yeah, especially we're going to talk about triggers and |
| 0:43.6 | picking battles. You love a trigger, don't you? Oh, yeah. No, I'm excited. Hi, Michelle. Hi. Can I say |
| 0:48.8 | something that I do? Speaking of disrespect. Here we go. Disrespect, trigger, pick a battle. |
| 0:55.3 | Let's see if I respond. |
| 0:56.5 | Since you've learned some of the terminology of like therapy speak, you use it a lot. |
| 1:04.9 | Like you use trigger a lot. |
| 1:07.1 | And there's another word that you use quite often. |
| 1:10.1 | And I'm like, whoever taught her these words, which is probably me. Probably toxic or one of those. But I just, it's funny. It is funny. Anyways, I digress. Hi. Oh, I think, hi. I do think some of those words that are named are pretty apropos. Is that the right word? I'm triggered. I'm triggered again. Yeah, you're triggering me. You're not always triggered. |
| 1:29.8 | Maybe. No. Okay. No, this is going to be a good conversation. I'm excited about it. |
| 1:33.7 | There is an interesting dynamic that comes because, you know, we talk about this show from our |
| 1:38.5 | lived experience, of course. And obviously, everyone's lives are unique and it's not a one-size one size fits all when we talk about any of these practices. |
| 1:48.0 | But certainly when it comes to disrespect, when it comes to difficult conversations, setting boundaries, |
| 1:54.0 | standing up for yourself, I think there has to be an element of balance when it comes to the lens with which you view |
| 2:04.1 | some of these things. Because I think if not, everything will become that. Like, it's, I know |
| 2:11.2 | we talked about this on a recent episode where if you're constantly looking for proof of what you |
... |
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