Practically Joyful Mom

Have you ever felt like you just don't know what to do? Maybe it's about a big decision like a move or maybe it's in the middle of a challenging situation like the oh-so-fun moment when your child has a meltdown in the grocery store. Press play for a perspective shift and practical tips about these moments when we feel unsure of how to move forward. 

Olympic athletes don’t just train once, but over and over to reach a high level of excellence. Expecting our kids to change after we talk to them one time about an issue isn’t realistic either. Nor is it realistic to expect ourselves to grow by leaps and bounds in any area without consistent practice over time. Excellence takes time. Training takes time. But the good news is that we aren’t alone in our efforts to grow and help our children to do the same.

What if someone wrote a biography of your life? How would the story of this time in your life read? Would it be full of grumpiness and complaining or would it be a story of how you brought light and joy even in the midst of a difficult season? 

It can be easy to let the month of Thanksgiving become all about doing and not about gratitude. Today we’re talking about why it matters to create or strengthen a habit of gratitude and how we can do it. 

We live in a time when parenting advice is everywhere. There are many valuable tricks and tips out there and learning from other parents is a great way to build up our own parenting skills. But we all have those moments in parenting when we find ourselves thinking, “I don’t know what to do!”. In those moments (and all the time) one of our most powerful parenting tools is to pray for wisdom.

In a world of social media and lots of comparison it can be so easy to feel as though we aren't doing a good enough job at anything or as though our work isn't important. Today we are talking about how determining what your own work is and sinking yourself into it can be much more satisfying and fulfilling than constantly comparing your life and work with others. 

We would all like our kids to know how to apologize and to do it when needed but it doesn't always seems so easy. Today's episode is all about why knowing how to apologize matters and how to help our kids learn. 

As the weather gets colder and cloudier, it can be easy to retreat from the outdoors into more time inside. It’s normal to spend less time outside when it’s not warm and sunny but there are still great benefits to getting outside most days - for us and our kids. Today’s episode is all about the wonderful benefits of time outside and practical ideas to make it happen.

We all have a choice in the stories we tell ourselves about our days. We can choose to tell a "terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day" sort of story or we can choose to tell ourselves a story of beauty and goodness. We can narrate to ourselves the same day in two radically different ways. And our choice in how we tell the story affects how we feel, how we act towards others and even the trajectory of our day. 

Bad habits are hard to break. Whether it's nail biting, being glued to your phone or yelling at your kids, it's incredibly difficult to just try to stop a bad habit. We will have much more success when we think about replacing the negative habit with something more beneficial and intentional. This applies not only to our own lives but to our kids as well.