SHE Asked Podcast
Welcome to The SHE Asked Podcast with Anna McBride—a space where the stories we tell ourselves are challenged, reimagined, and rewritten to unlock personal transformation.
Hosted by former therapist, storyteller, and lifelong seeker Anna McBride, this podcast dives deep into the power of narrative. Through personal stories and intimate conversations with guests, we explore how shifting our internal dialogue can change not just how we see our lives—but how we live them.
Each episode offers what Anna calls “practical hope”—real tools, lived experience, and emotional honesty for anyone feeling stuck, lost, or ready for change. Whether you’re navigating divorce, grief, reinvention, or simply trying to understand your past, The SHE Asked Podcast invites you to become the author of your own story—and the hero in it, too.
Follow along for weekly episodes filled with compassion, perspective, and the courage to ask yourself:
What story am I telling—and is it still serving me?
SHE Asked Podcast
Practical Hope For The Holidays
How did the season of joy become a month of stress and obligation?
In this episode of She Asked: Tools for Practical Hope, Anna offers a gentle guide for anyone seeking peace, presence, and purpose during the holiday season.
Through three powerful lessons: Awareness + Intention +Alignment — Anna helps you move from performance to presence and design traditions that truly reflect who you are now, not who you used to be.
🕯️In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Why awareness is the first step to healing family-of-origin patterns.
- How to bring intention and authenticity to your holiday rituals.
- Simple affirmations and journaling prompts to cultivate calm and clarity.
- How to choose presence over performance — and create new sacred traditions.
This is your invitation to reclaim the holidays as a spiritual practice — one built on self-trust, simplicity, and love.
👉 Subscribe to She Asked: Tools for Practical Hope for more weekly reflections on healing, spirituality, and personal growth.
Welcome back to She Asks. Tools for Practical Hope. The holidays are right around the corner. And for many of us, the holidays represent stress, anxiety, obligation, duty. I know that it is true for me, and I know I'm not alone that way. But today I want to share with you some spiritual lessons that come from us starting to become aware of how we're practicing during the holidays, how we're showing up. Then become more intentional, and then finally just make sure we are acting in alignment with who we are or who we want to be. This is my hope for today and what I want to express because growing up, it wasn't like that for me. Every year, during the holidays, I would tell myself, this year it's gonna be different. This year I'm going to be me. And then somewhere around the mid-season of holidays, I would be realizing this is the same movie. The same script. And I wasn't happy. I was pretty much acting out my family of origin scripts around the holidays. And I always had to make sure the house looked perfect, that there were plenty of gifts, like I had the right outfit, the right hairdo. Everything became a performance. When really deep inside, I just wanted to be comfortable. I wanted to be in my PJs. I wanted to relax. I wanted to play with my kids. I always followed through on what I perceived as was the obligation, the duty to my family, much less to my husband's family. No matter where we lived, we flew home. It didn't matter if we couldn't afford it. Thanksgiving was my mother's favorite holiday, so we had to be there for that. Yet you can't fly into town for one parent and not see the other parent. And when you are traipsing three children around, it's a lot. I'm sure you can understand that. And it didn't feel like we had a choice. This is what can happen, I think, when you don't know who you are in regards to traditions and you don't know what you want to do. Or you're not at a position to be able to say what you mean as to what you want to do for yourself. It took many years for me to get to this point where we I wanted to live more intentionally. So we're going to do that together today. I'm going to share with you some research that talks about this. I'm going to give you some journaling prompts to help you create the holidays that you want. And then I'm going to also offer you an affirmation for each of these lessons to help you really integrate this into your being so that you can show up the way you want to. Because this is a spiritual practice. So let's dive into this. The first lesson to all this is awareness. Without awareness, we can't change. We can't even claim who we want to be. So what I'm talking about is you can't heal until you know what you're doing, maybe at an unconscious level, and bring it to consciousness. So that's like I had to admit what I was doing in autopilot because I thought this is what I've always done, this is what I need to do. And I came into the part of me that was like, you know what? I get to choose. I need to own my choices. Most of us don't choose our holiday traditions. We actually just act out from our family of origin. We inherit them. And without awareness, we will keep repeating things even if they are harming us. So my holidays growing up were full of stress and arguments. My parents were at odds through the whole thing. And I did the same thing in my marriage, is that I unconsciously went right into the stress mode, overspent, and felt neglected or even resentful. And it didn't matter that I wanted to be joyful. I just didn't have it in me because I was exhausted from all of what I was doing. There was a 2023 study in the American Psychological Association, which said that 70% of adults are highly stressed during the holidays. And it's not because they don't want joy or that they lack joy, it's the dynamics within the family and the financial strain brought to bear because we're caught up in the gift giving or the food preparation. We can go overboard. So knowing that we can be stressed during the holidays, and we get to decide like how are we going to manage that and how are we going to maybe act in contrary to that? Awareness invites us to pause and ask ourselves questions. So I'm going to give you a question to consider. Where are you acting in autopilot? Do you just do what you think is expected of you, or do you show up because you want to? Because it really matters to you. I was a very dutiful daughter and a dutiful daughter-in-law. And so I was performing through the whole thing. And truly resentful deep down. No one was asking me. Not even me. I wasn't even asking me. What do I want to do? Is this really what I want to do? This is the level of awareness that I am suggesting us to get really honest about. Because autopilot isn't authentic, it's performative. Until we see the pattern, we cannot change it. So notice where you're showing up in autopilot. So maybe a journaling question might be like this: which holiday traditions do I participate in that I no longer want to do? Maybe hard, depending on what your relationship is within your family. We as a family decided that we weren't going to give gifts to each other, we were going to travel together. And that was a conscious decision that we made. Yet that didn't come till later in our kids' lives. And really was more in alignment with what I wanted to do. I finally found my voice to say, this is what I want. I want time, not stuff. And you know what? The moment I was intentional about that, it was easy to express that. So we had to really be clear about where we were being an autopilot before we could change how we were performing. So here's an affirmation to consider as a part of this lesson. I bring awareness to the patterns I inherited. And I choose the ones I really want to do. Meaning, what traditions do you want to create? With this affirmation, which you may have to repeat many times, you will gain the permission to have the type of holidays that you want. In fact, my children and I have decided we do not like turkey when it comes to Thanksgiving. We go a different way. So lesson number two, intention. Tradition as an expression of who you're becoming versus who you were brought up to be. And tradition is at best a mirror. A mirror reflecting of who we are and what we value. So it's a mirror of who we are and what we value. But as we evolve, we don't have to keep being who we were. And I think that's where intention comes in. That we can outgrow certain traditions. We can decide to walk away from expectations and become the version of ourselves that we want to be. In 2022, the Pew Research Study showed that almost 40% of adults under the age of 50 were recreating their family traditions, not only because they were blending families, they were also becoming more independent, both geographically as well as financially, from the family that they grew up in. So they wanted to have a new expression. And this was intentional. When I read this study, I was thinking, wow, they're really keeping in mind their values, their new family ideas, and their new belief system. They're not going with the old belief system they grew up in, they're creating a new one. So this is sacred work. You need to ask yourself, what do I want to feel like this season? Do I want to feel joyful? Do I want to feel connection? Do I want to feel peace? Do I want to feel simplicity? Or do you want to feel stress, resentful? And that might sound like a trick question because of course we want to have the positive feelings and not the negative ones. Yet if we're not intentional with what we're choosing, we may end up with the negative side. Because if that's what you grew up in, that may be what comes up within you. I know that was true for me. So I invite you to create the traditions that support that feeling. It may sound really simple, it's not easy. Yet it's that clear. You design your rituals around that feeling. Maybe you only bake one thing instead of 20 things. Right? A few items of food versus bringing the whole smorgasbord. Maybe you skip mailing a gift and all the stress that goes around that. And write an intentional card with a real meaningful message because we don't have to keep sending stuff as a symbol of our commitment. I think we just need to communicate and connect more. And then if we go to visit, let's take a moment and really breathe before we enter into the family setting. Really connecting with how do I want to show up? How do I want to be here this year so that I'm who I am versus who I used to perform as? Because we're not characters, we're real beings. That's intention. So here's a journaling question for you to consider. If I designed the holiday rituals and the way I'm going to show up in them, what would that look like? What would be my attitude? Because it's a bit of a character development, yet with intention, it's one you can embody. And I've had to become more intentional every time I reconnect with my family of origin, my brothers and sisters, my sisters-in-law. Because you're not the person I was that they grew up with. Yet it's very easy to slip into old patterns. That's why you've got to be intentional how you want to carry yourself going into the holidays so that you can actually show up the way you want to. So here's an affirmation for you to recite. I am free to create the rituals that I want, and I am free to show up in those rituals as I want to be. The third lesson is around alignment. Presence over performance. We're going to be the real beings that we are. So alignment means choosing presence over performance. It's where we go from doing to being. In Harvard, they did a study around intentional rituals. In order to get ready to get into the holidays, they said we gotta do intentional things. So that can go from something as simple as lighting a candle before a meal, or saying a short prayer or an affirmation before you walk into a room or a family setting, or however you want to be. This is the way we gather ourselves, align ourselves so that our mind, body, and spirit are in the same place. And it helps us, according to the study, to increase happiness and reduce anxiety, because it'll ground us in the present moment. So instead of chasing perfection, what if we created one moment every day where we were authentically allowed to be us? Acknowledge how you feel. Be that honest with yourself. And then if you want to carry yourself differently, align with who you want to be in that moment. Mind, body, spirit. So this could be being present for your morning cup of tea or coffee. It could be a handwritten card instead of a gift. And maybe even a shared moment of silence or connection. I used to always have to fill the silence with words, with objects, food, instead of just really feeling, connecting, listening instead of speaking. This is where we can get into old patterns, old ways of being. And nothing changes if nothing changes. And so the change has to begin with me. I need to commit to be in alignment. I'm only going to create rituals that are meaningful to me because I want to. I am no longer going to do things that I don't want to do. I don't have to. That's authentically me. And so here is a journaling question for you to consider. How can you bring more presence and less pressure to your holidays? More presence, less pressure. How can you do that? Maybe it might be ordering in pizza, whatever it is. Less pressure, less anxiety means we can be more present, more connected. And here's an affirmation for you to help you through the holidays. I release performance and return to presence. I release performance and return to presence. When we can be here right now or wherever we are: feet, body, mind, spirit, heart, the sacredness is restored. Because it's in the present moment, not in the anxiety, not in the pressure. So as we go into the holiday season, I want you to keep remembering awareness, intention, alignment, the three lessons that are here for you to learn about yourself and how you show up this year of all years for the holidays, for yourself, for your family, for your spirit. So this week, I invite you to design one intentional tradition that's authentically yours for this holiday, for whether it's Thanksgiving, whether it's Christmas or whatever traditions you may be celebrating the remainder of this year. Maybe it's journaling under the lights of your Christmas tree or your Hanukkah candles or an intentional donation in name of someone that you lost or care about. Instead of overbuying, donate and simplify your gift giving. Whatever it is, make it sacred, make it meaningful, make it yours. I want to thank you for being here with me today and considering these lessons that are a part of this holiday season so that we can be more in alignment with our true self. Until next time, I've been your host, Anna McBride, and I've been so excited to have you here and join me today. Until soon, be well.