Simple on Purpose | Intentional Living and Parenting

I am a decades-long nightowl, but it doesn't always serve me well in motherhood. Some years ago I made 'sleep' my health goal (not becoming a morning person, but simply heading to bed earlier). I want to share the benefits of sleep and strategies that can help you give up that nightowl life. 

 

Products recommended here may include referral links to Amazon. If you click through and buy something I may earn a commission, at no cost to you.

In this episode I talk about:

How sleep was handled in our upbringing

How technology impacts our experience of motherhood

The cultural expectations for sleep and self-care as it pertains to moms

How moms are trying to get self-care, in ways that it impacts their sleep

The benefits of sleep

Being a nightowl, the benefits and the costs

Strategies to set a sleep goal

Addressing the things that keep us up

Strategies to make sleep easier

Building up self-trust with yourself

The need for rest

Having more rest in your day and week

 

All the related links:

Grave's disease (My Thyroid, My Frenemy {Grave’s Disease to Hypothyroid}

Reading books instead of social media (4 simple habits that make my momlife better)

Studies and information on the benefits of sleep:

the Sleep Foundation

Memory consolidation (Healthy Sleep, Harvard)

The role of sleep in emotional processing

Intentional phone habits episodes + worksheets

Feeling addicted to your phone

Setting intentional phone habits

Brain dump (blog post)

Magnesium drink powder to help you relax, and this one to help you sleep

Ashwaganda

Blue light blockers (the ones I use here)

Enable red tint on your phone (instructions here)

Greyscale your phone (instructions here)

Study on blue lights and circadian rhythms

Huberman Lab Toolkit for Sleep 

Exercising for better sleep (John Hopkins Medicine)

Building self-trust with yourself (podcast episode)

Getting a day of rest, as a mom (podcast episode)

Church and chill day (family rhythms)

 

Full transcript (unedited)

0:08

Hey friends, it's Shawna, your nerdy girlfriend and counselor from simple on purpose.ca.  And I'm excited for what we're going to talk about today we're going to talk about the topic of rest. We're continuing on with the series on meeting your needs. In the last episode, we talked about nourishment. And I told you, I was going to continue on sharing these basic needs, we have these basic actions of self care. And I don't want to tell you what to do. But I want to share my journey with it. And with each topic, I want to address the culture that impacts how we relate to this basic need, and how I've changed my own mindsets about it over the years. Additionally, the strategies that have helped me with this basic need that have helped me to take better care of myself. Today we're going to talk about sleep and I want to share with you how I went from what I see myself as a night owl. A morning tragedy. tragedy is a good word for it. And someone who never really intentionally rested in a week. And I think I've really become someone now who loves an early night. I love a good tuck in. I'm not a morning tragedy, maybe I've downgraded but maybe a morning bumbler would be a better, I'm still not awesome in the mornings. And I think I am someone who prioritizes rest in the week. And you maybe can feel that I'm painting a picture of how I used to be this night owl. I have been a night owl since I can remember. I was a teenager with insomnia. That's how I would have labeled myself. I just adopted that mold of being a night owl. And that reputation of just being a miserable human being upon the waking hours. If you ask my little sister, she'll tell you, the many glares and snares that her otherwise happy sister would dish out to the whole family at seven in the morning like these innocent bystanders.

1:59

Just getting my wrath, my morning wrath. And as a teenager, I can really remember laying in my bed in the dark stressing about it. Sometimes just listening to the staticky am radio wondering what other people do to fall asleep. I at one point I even was prescribed sleeping pills, I thought, hey, maybe that could solve my problem. But instead, it just gave me nightmares. And it made sleep even harder.

2:24

I can look back on the version of me in my late teens my early adulthood. And I can clearly see the symptoms of Graves disease, Graves disease, which I would be diagnosed with around age 27. But with most people with autoimmune diseases, we're the sum of our symptoms. And we're going to a doctor with these individual symptoms. And they're treating individual symptoms and setting instead of putting that puzzle together and treating the actual problem.

2:52

And the culture that I grew up in, I'm talking about how our culture influences how we're meeting our needs. I would look around and see that my parents stayed up a lot to no one was really saying, hey, get to bed or no one was getting to bed themselves. My mom wouldn't be on the computer or folding laundry and watching recorded episodes of all my children. Remember that soap? She had it all on those VHS and I thought Oh, it's okay. Like people stay up late, everyone seems to figure it out. And I had evidence to say that that was true, because I feel like I really did figure it out. It wasn't a big problem. You know, I had to stay up late in college to do homework. And as a young adult, you're staying up late with friends. I mean, sure, the world is built for morning people, but I could just live off coffee, I could skip a day I could figure it all out. And it really wasn't until I became a mum that how I managed to sleep was creating a problem for me. On one hand, of course, there's a lot less sleep in general. And mums spend a lot of energy wondering how everybody can get more sleep. And then on the other hand, when you don't sleep well, you don't act well. And that was very evident for me in my most tired days of motherhood.

4:02

I feel like when we're talking about culture, it's also worth talking about technology, because it impacts our current experience of motherhood. And I had my first two kids in 2011 and 2012. And I would spend my nights nursing and scrolling Pinterest or back then what the original version of Instagram was. Remember that like that real cozy, connected version of Instagram, that raw that genuine photos in the moment. And I was also listening to podcasts on productivity and blogging because that was something that I was wanting to do. And from everything I was reading from everything I was hearing, I put together this rule that in order to maximize my personal potential as a mum, I had to become a morning person. In the concept of being a morning person, I plan to do a whole separate podcast on that. But what I think is important to consider, especially for moms, is the cultural expectation that if a mom needs some time to herself, she should get up at 530 anymore.

5:00

Honey, get in her exercise, drink this smoothie journal, her emotions or whatever, and get herself ready for the day. This is society solution to self care for moms. And I'm not going to knock it because I have friends who do this. I have clients who do this, I know women who do this, and they actually get a lot of value out of it to them. That's a great, like a great morning a great experience for them. To them, it's a solution for self care. But you know what my solution to self care was for years, it was staying up late, staying up watching trashy TV, eating the most delicious hits of crunchy chips of dopamine, scrolling through social media without guilt that my kids are seeing me stare at a screen, texting all my mom besties probably doing a chore we that I didn't get around to all day. And then I hit the bed, maybe scroll some more. And in those last quiet moments, my brain would just get flooded with all of the anxiety, of all of the things all that mental load that I was just carrying around like a brain full of mental clutter all day long. And then what happens when we wake up Instant Regret should have gone to bed sooner, maybe even some shame that I haven't figured out a better morning routine. And the promise that I'll go to bed early tonight, a promise that I'm going to break.

6:18

It was about 2019 when I was setting goals for myself for the year. And when I got to the health category, I decided that sleep was going to be my focus. And a big part of this I've shared this before is how watching my mom deal with early onset dementia really brought me face to face with my own health, I was paying attention to my health. Because after all these things are hereditary. So I have that fear and that urgency driving me and I was at a place especially years ago, reading articles listening to many doctors about the risk factors for them for dementia. And all of them sounded like the basics of self care, diet, movement and sleep. And so in 2019, when I got to that health card category, I said sleep is going to be my focus. But I was going to approach this all differently.

7:03

What was different for me was I wasn't going to make it about how early I got up, I was going to focus on the night time on the getting to sleep. Because for years, I shamed myself for not being a morning person, I felt like this sub optimal human, I lacked discipline, I lacked motivation. I was a weak human who lacked the basic skills of waking up at 630. Like all of those very productive, shiny, happy people in the world. This is a topic I would get coaching on over the years, I would try hacks, I would set goals like get up and work out at 6am when at the time, I didn't like working out and like sure didn't like getting up at 6am. So I had set all these goals. And now I was going to set it in a different way I was going to approach this differently, and do the work of being a well rested human instead of tryi

If you feel stressed out and overwhelmed, consider how you meet your basic needs - especially how you feed yourself well and often. In this episode, I share my journey to ensure I am nourishing myself, as a busy mom. Including 11 different strategies that I find help to make sure I am meeting this basic need. 

 

 

Products recommended here may include referral links to Amazon. If you click through and buy something I may earn a commission, at no cost to you. 

 

In this episode

The culture we grow up in shapes how we feed ourselves

The modern cultural expectations for moms and food 

Hyperfixation on health

Going gluten and dairy free, the whole30, heartburn

How staying nourished helps us maintain our window of tolerance 

11 strategies that have helped me ensure I feed myself well and often 

 

All the fun links you might enjoy 

The baby who always cried (our story with esophagitis)

Mindful eating for moms (Interview with Jessica Penner)

Teaching our kids a healthy relationship with food (+ our own food guilt and body shame) with Andrea Heyman

Understanding how the window of tolerance impacts your stress in motherhood

What I ate during the whole30

11 things I learned from doing the whole30 diet challenge

A simple hack to make meal planning easy

Four simple habits that make my momlife easier (vegetables for breakfast)

Paying attention to how you feel (body and emotional awareness) – (the mind-body connection)

The almond mom (GMA article)

 

Sign up for the Simple Saturdays email (a fun email, twice a month)

Find me on Instagram

FULL TRANSCRIPT 

0:10

 Welcome to another episode of The Simple on purpose Podcast. I'm so happy you're here. At simple on purpose, my aim is to help you simplify your home, your heart and your life so that you can show up for your life on purpose.

And today we're going to be talking about a topic in the meeting your needs series, we're actually going to talk about the topic that started the whole series. Because what happened was, I shared a story on Instagram about eating lunch, and how much we need to make sure that we as moms are eating real food, too. And there was a conversation on Instagram that came from that, and it made me realize there's so much more I want to say.

So I laugh at myself, because I was going to do one simple episode on lunch. One simple podcast episode on lunch, and it turned into this series about meeting your needs, which really, it just might be a factor of the overwhelm, I feel when I come to do the podcast because I take it too far. I can't do that, you know, seven minute quick episode, I feel like there's just way too much to consider. I just want to talk about all the things.

So we've talked about in this series, meeting our needs, what we've learned to believe around meeting our needs. Working through the process of becoming aware, validating, and handling our approach to meeting our needs. We've talked about self care and self love, and looking at what our moms have taught us and what mums of other generations have experienced. And I let you know that as we were moving forward, I will be sharing my own stories with some of the basic needs that I have learned to meet in myself. So I'm going to be sharing one of those stories today. And it's not to tell you how you should do it. This isn't about telling you how and what to eat. But this can just be a story where there's framework around how we can meet our needs and different approaches, and some ideas on how you might want to do that if this is a need, that you are focusing on in your own life.

So today we're talking about feeding ourselves, or as I like to call it nourishing ourselves. And for me, food was a big crash course in realizing that I had physical needs I had to pay attention to there's been a process as I've gone through the decades of motherhood, where I just realized how detached I have been from my body. And so realizing my physical needs was actually a challenge for me. And I think this is a really important subject to talk about as well, because for me, at least, it took me way too long to realize how much food impacted how I feel. And therefore how I acted. And you know, some days, I still need that reminder, like, Hey, girl, you're hungry.

And as with any topic around meeting our needs, I think it helps to consider the culture that we grew up in, and the culture that we currently live in. And when I think about what I saw around food growing up, it was not a healthy version of feeding oneself. And part of that is just really the era that I grew up in it was the 80s and 80s baby. And convenience was really becoming this new novel thing. And as long as that label said low fat, or local people thought they were making healthy decisions.

So we had foods that came from cans and boxes and powders. They were frozen, they were fortified with fiber and nutrients they were made to make our lives easier. So our moms who are now going out into the workforce, they could have confidence that they're feeding their families quickly and healthily.

One of the side effects of moms heading back to work in this era, which I'm not disparaging by any means is that the kids were home alone, feeding themselves and not downplaying that either. That's a life skill. But I know for me as a kid, as a young teen in this era, I was opening up the cupboards for these convenient foods, and I was feeling up on packaged brownies, frozen pizzas. And sometimes I would get really culinary and I would heat up a tortilla with some salsa and melt cheese on top. And I felt like you know, little resident chef when I did that.

Of course, as a teenager. I didn't realize it then. But how did I feel physically in those years of my life, I felt pretty crappy. As kids our parents are our models of living.

So when we consider how our own parents approached food, we might see the model that was handed down to us. I look at my dad and he has in still eats a diet that is mainly either fried foods or things coated in sugar. It's just really a phenomenon. It's a phenomenon, that he's still upright and functioning. And and then I've looked at my mom and I'm pretty sure she lived off tea and toast. And I know I've shared some of her story in the past episodes about what our moms would say about self care and self love. And I look back at a woman who was just spread so thin with so many things that eating or at least eating what we now know are healthy foods. It wasn't a priority, I think she really thought she was eating healthy. If there was yogurt that said lo cal and she was eating the whole wheat toast, she thought she was good. I think that was really a matter of doing the best with what you had in that in that time,

I look into how I handled food as a teen and early adult years on, I know, I didn't eat enough again, like my mom not out of intention, for more of a lack of intention. I was eating what was easy, what was there what I liked, which wasn't much, I also decided to be the world's worst vegetarian. So I was also anemic, that to get iron shots, I really look back. And I see that I felt slow and tired, I was getting headaches all the time. I did not feel great, did not feel great.

I wouldn't have ever reflected on what I learned about food growing up until I had kids on my own until I had a family to feed. And now I was face to face with everything I'd learned and adopted and was doing on autopilot into the modern culture that we live in now, where there's a lot of judgment and rules around food and how moms should be feeding their kids.

And so as I brought my own beliefs and structures and foundations into this current culture, I was kind of angry. To contrast these two, I was kind of angry at what I had learned versus what every the science is telling us and we need to be doing. I was a little bit upset that no one all those years was making me these three healthy colorful meals a day or teaching me how to make foods or teaching me how food impacted my body. I was upset that I had lived years not eating well and was sad that it had impacted my body. And it impacted my whole approach to how I was eating now. And all of this anger, it wasn't placed on my parents. It wasn't really placed on anyone, I don't think my parents were negligent. And we just really didn't have the information we have now. But I think that that's just a normal processing emotion to go through when you realize, oh, there is another way. And maybe the old way doesn't actually work anymore. Maybe there's a new way.

As I was reflecting on what I had learned, I also realized that I had developed some emotional eating. In my early years of motherhood. I found myself overwhelmed with motherhood stressed out. And when those kids went down for a nap time, it was like me my time. And I would just like to be energetically drawn to the pantry open up the door wasn't even thinking, rummaging through it for whatever was probably chocolate. And that was just something I looked forward to it was a reward. It was something I could control. I was definitely doing it for how I would feel. And eventually it hit me oh,

7:44

this is emotional eating. I had never understood it before because food was just something you had to do. If you want to hear more about that. Listen to the episode I did with Jessica Penner on mindful eating. I'll link that in the show notes.

So I was holding up in my motherhood, all that I had learned about food growing up and what I had now. And what do you notice in the culture of food? Now what do you notice is the messaging that you get around food, in your own culture, whether it's locally within your own peer groups, your own town, your own country, what do you notice? Because I think there can be a lot of shame and pressure really heaped onto moms to feed our families in a certain way....

From becoming aware, to validation, to giving ourselves permission to disrupt the system - we have some steps that can help us in our process of Becoming Someone Who Takes Care of Themselves. I want to share with you how decluttering led me to assess how I was taking care of myself, and how I worked from my basic needs, in small steps to more personal needs. 

Products recommended here may include referral links to Amazon. If you click through and take action I may be compensated at no additional cost to you.

In this episode I talk more about:

Our basic needs

The wheel of self care

Self-care of ourselves vs caring for others

The cultural rules of self-care for moms

Owning our own narrative of motherhood 

The process of becoming someone who takes care of themselves: awareness, validation, permission, approach

All or nothing thinking

 

Links you might like 

174. Christmas hygge ideas + understanding how the window of tolerance impacts your stress in motherhood

First episode in the series 179. What are your needs and how are you meeting them?

Second episode in the series 180. Self-care and self-love, what would our mothers say?

The Joy of Less by Francine Jay 

Small things matter 78. Small things that can change your whole life (the compound effect)

When Motherhood Can Change You but You Can’t Change Motherhood

When the Body Says No by Gabor Mate

Self care assessment 

Enneagram Enneagram 101 (what is it and what are the nine types)

139. Are you TOO comfortable? And what is it costing you?

113. Why you aren’t thriving in motherhood (stress and surviving)

Sign up for Simple Saturdays Email 

Talk to me on Instagram 

 

The Wheel of Self Care, by Olga Phoenix

 

Full Transcript (unedited)

0:09

Hey friends, it's Shawna, your nerdy girlfriend and counselor from simpleonpurpose.ca. Welcome the simple on purpose podcast, we are continuing our series about meeting our needs in today I want to talk about becoming someone who takes care of themselves. In the last episode, I talked about how we can shift our approach to the things we call self love and self care. And when we are proactive with self care, then we can become better at creating and maintaining capacity, capacity for our lives and capacity matters. Capacity, having capacity, it helps us feel like we're just able to handle our day. If you've heard talk about the window of tolerance, I think that's a good example of capacity. When we are in our window of tolerance, we feel like we have capacity, I'll make sure to link an episode on that where I've talked about that in the past. So when we are not meeting our needs, we have lowered capacity. Or maybe another way to say this is that meeting our needs increases our capacity. In the very first episode of this series, we talked about our relationship to our needs and how we learn from our upbringing, what's acceptable, what's not, what's a burden, who meets our needs, how do we express them, whose needs Should we meet whose needs are more important, and so on. And then we also are living in this world where we hear a lot about self care and self love. But we've also have some handed down notions from our own mothers and the mothers in our lives. I shared my own story around that in the last episode. And so we're all entering into this conversation with a bit of a different framework on what's comfortable, what's right, what's acceptable when it comes to our needs as a women and moms. I have been asking around what do you consider your basic needs basic needs. And I see a general consensus that our basic needs are what we need to survive, food, sleep, shelter, water. And I'm going to be honest, I know some of us are not very good at three out of four. And I will tell you my very basic list, when I entered into this mindset of becoming someone who takes care of themselves, it did start with food, sleep, water and, and physical space, my home. I'll talk about that a little bit more later on. But addressing the complacency of how I was taking care of my home, was really the first step to me addressing the complacency of how I was taking care of myself. And I would have ended my list of basic needs right there with those four things. But I have come to see how when I take care of those, then there's other things that become available for me to take care of as well. And additionally, as I went through training for counseling, we had to write our own self care plans on how we were going to take care of ourselves through the program. And we had to also include it in our treatment plans with our clients, where we were considering how our clients could write up these self care plans and take care of the different parts of themselves. And what I've learned is that many mental health practitioners will use the wheel of wellness or the wheel of self care. And there's a popular one, I'll make sure to link it in the show notes by Olga Phoenix, she developed it for a trauma healing workbook, but it's widely used, and it has these categories. It has physical, and that ranges from housing, medical care, taking time for appointments, massages, taking a walk psychological, where we are doing our self reflection, our therapy, if we need it, where we're doing self expressive things like hobbies, and gardening, emotional where we are learning how to be in tune with our emotional selves, all the way up to practicing forgiveness. There's spiritual, whether you are connecting through nature or self reflection or joining a spiritual community. There's personal getting to know yourself what you like what you want out of life planning goals, that kind of thing. There's also professional and that is how we show up in our work lives, whether it is having boundaries, and taking on different challenges to how we are handling our coworkers. So that kind of feels like a lot. Maybe as a moment feels like too much because, I mean, some of us aren't even eating or sleeping properly. And then you add all of this plus all of the people. So if you feel an inner panic, or even an inner dismissal, I get that. And I want to just say this, don't go into self care with this all or nothing thinking. There's lots of ideas on different things we can pay attention to. And we don't have to do everything. We don't have to do all of the things in fact, start where you're at little things matter. But I think this conversation also helps us acknowledge that we can really short ourselves when it comes to what we let pass a self care for us versus self care for others. And some of us might feel it's noble or even necessary to care. We're better for others than ourselves. Some of us don't question it, some of us aren't even aware of it. And as mums, we need to consider how we are reinforcing cultural definitions on what it looks like for mums to meet their needs. Do not let your culture tell you that having a shower is a nice break for you. I mean, sure, water therapy real thing. But don't tell me that cleaning my body and washing, like oatmeal and you know, sweat off of my body is me time? No, it's personal hygiene. Because if a shower is me time, well then what about that long, hot bubble bath? When your partner handles bedtimes? What will we say to moms then? Oh, what a luxury? Do you deserve that? Or don't let people tell you that go into the grocery store? Alone? Oh, it's a nice break for you. Do we say that to dads? I mean, of course, it's easier without kids. But we still need groceries, we still need to feed people. It's not like we take a jet to Italy and buy some pasture and tomatoes while we're sipping on a cappuccino on an Italian patio. And then how about moms who go on a yoga retreat or any retreat of interest to her to them, while their kids are taken care of Safe at Home? Man, what do we think we think she must not really want to be around her kids. It's a little selfish. Like, what it is a double standard again, for fathers. And I get it, I have been a stay at home mom for all of my kids, even now I only work during school hours. So I get that for some of us. Mum is the job. And we have a lot of feelings and definitions around how that should be. But it's also a job that has been impacted by the cultural definitions around us of what a mum should be doing, how she should be acting, how she should be looking how she should be taking care of herself, how should I be taking care of others, when what actually should happen is that we should define that job for ourselves within our own family context. Because the reality is no one else is doing this job for us in additionally, it's a job, we had no idea what it would look like when we signed up for it. I remember feeling so surprised at how angry I was in motherhood. I remember being so surprised at how a lack of sleep made me absolutely miserable. And I'm still surprised every season that comes along in parenting, I feel like there's hard parts that I had no clue to expect. Or like I heard about them, but then I was in them. And it just felt so overwhelming. So I've learned that taking care of myself and all of this helps me go to battle so to speak, it helps me to feel resourced. It helps me to feel like I can take on the hard parts and show up for the awesome parts. And it also feels a little bit countercultural sometimes to set boundaries and take care of myself as well as my people. So as we talk, what's important is for you to own your definition of what your needs are. What is your definition right now of what your needs are? And do you like it? Does it help you ultimately you get to own your own narrative here. I found it was really interesting to start hearing back from you guys, especially moms on this topic, because there's a little bit of a theme of, I didn't even know I was neglecting my own needs. Almost just a lack of awareness because we're just living on autopilot....

Sometimes we can find ourselves reaching for a bowl of chocolate, scrolling through social media, or checking out for the night, and call that self-care. But that is really self-comfort and only serves to numb the discomfort instead of fixing it. Self-care is tuning into ourselves and finding out what we need to do to care for ourselves. Listen in as I discuss self-care and self-love, and how that has changed over the years since our mothers were young.

 

 

Main topics:

The difference between self-care and self-comfort

Meeting our needs and our capacity (window of tolerance)

Accepting cheap substitutes to meet our needs

What we think it means when our needs are going unmet

The culture of moms meeting their needs, is it intuitive? 

What we learn from our mothers about self-care and self-love

Why the term self-love feels challenging. 

 

Related links:

Self-care assessment 

Is self care the answer when motherhood sucks? (blog post)

Understanding how the window of tolerance impacts your stress in motherhood (episode)

How to find confidence in being the mom you are (episode)

Being a mom on purpose  (it is not about happy, obedient kids) (episode)

67. Making motherhood harder than it needs to be (Mom Martyr)

The highlight reel of moms talking about self-care and meeting their needs 

 

Simple Saturdays email (sign up here)

Instagram (message me on IG)

 

FULL TRANSCRIPT (unedited)

We're gonna continue on with our series about meeting your needs. And I want to talk more about self care and self love and how this is about it. But it's also not about it. The whole series, meeting your needs, I don't think that is one that I would listen to if I saw that title sounds kind of weird to say, but I think many mums might feel this way you see something on meeting your needs, and you might think, I don't need that things are fine. Or there might be some resistance, because you're kind of worried is this another pitch for that self care, self love, do face masks in the bath, treat yourself, you deserve it love yourself, you're amazing. We are a little bit worried about where this is going to take us. Because I think some of us know that. That self care, self love cannot be an entire approach to living. There's parts that are so helpful, for sure. But the approach needs more to it, it kind of feels like thin ice over water. But we need that iceberg. Underneath we need that iceberg of values and beliefs. We need awareness, validation, radical acceptance before we move into self care and self love. So as I move forward with this topic of meeting your needs, I want to approach this topic from the work I've done with moms of all ages and stages all over the world. And that's the approach of addressing the overwhelm the stress, the expectations, the mental load that moms are under. Because this overwhelm it feels like a threat to us on a base level. And when we add in a reduced capacity to deal with that threat, you have yourself a chronic stress response. And that's what we're commonly operating from. That's why we need self care and self love. But at the at the core of it capacity is what's important. Capacity is one I want to talk about. For someone to feel capacity, they feel like they can do they feel capable, they have met their basic needs, so that they can move forward with dealing with things and feeling capable. Think of how capacity impacts you in your daily life. Think of how you show up in motherhood, when you have slept well, or have had a nourishing meal or when you've just gone out for a walk on your own and it felt really restorative. Or you've just met up with your besties and had some great laughs. But how often are we really giving ourselves the resources to restore and maintain our capacity, I would say the opposite often happens that we spend more energy scrambling to deal with our lack of capacity rather than we spend building it. And what I mean by that is, first of all, we don't stop and acknowledge our needs. So by default, we're just not meeting them proactively. And I'm going to talk about this more in the next episode. So we're often in this state where we don't realize we have a need until it's too late. And then how do we act when our needs are not being met? What do you notice when you are at the end of your capacity, you might notice things like feeling enraged, really easy, burnt out overwhelmed. Maybe you shut down, maybe you go into that hyperactive mode, maybe you've kind of kind of become that mum, martyr, these can all be symptoms of having our needs go unmet for a while. And when you're feeling this way, we start paying attention. And we start to assume things about us in our lives. And one of three things is what we often assume we might assume something is wrong with me, something is wrong with them or something is wrong with my life. So we focus on addressing these now we focus on maybe something's wrong with me, and I just need to try better and do better, because other moms figure it out. And I should just figure it out. And I just need to hack it and be more disciplined. Or we focus on trying to control them. We tie our emotions to what other people around us are doing and it creates this whole like fragile governance of having to control them. In order for us to feel good or happier, calm. I call this emotional outsourcing. Or we try to change our life what would just make me feel better right now? Or what would just help me to not feel the gross feelings I'm feeling a cupcake, researching new bathroom towel, getting a new cute coat scrolling social media. I mean, I've done all of these. And we develop by doing this we develop smaller and smaller tolerance for just feeling discomfort. We spend a lot of energy trying to feel better, we blame others, we shame ourselves. We accept cheap substitutes to help us just feel good again. And these cheap substitutes they can look like self care but what they often are is self comfort. This is a differentiation that I did not make up I'd heard it on a podcast years ago and I think that podcast was sort of awesome. I'm not sure. So self care versus self comfort. Self comfort is a checking out or a numbing or a distraction more Then self care is checking in and listening and responding. And I would even offer that if we're getting to self comfort, it's almost always a response, that we haven't met our needs along the way. And it's reactive, it's meeting the deficit, self care can be really active, but it should really be proactive a shift for us, is to be proactive with meeting our needs, and protecting our capacity, which just leads into the whole conversation that this is easier said than done. Because first of all, we just don't know what we don't know. When I was a mom with two toddlers and a baby at home, getting very little sleep, living off of protein bars and coffee, I was in survival mode for sure. And even if there was a day where I wasn't a total stress case, I didn't really have that awareness that me myself needed to be paid attention to and needed to be cared for. I mean, I could do that for my kids, I could monitor them anticipate when they're hungry, when they're tired, what activities they're going to enjoy, help them with their sibling relationships, help them process feelings and cope, like I can do all of that for

6:02

them. But what about doing that for myself? And then when we realize we do have needs, we know how messy this can get. And just like we talked about in the last episode, we're going into this with a lifetime of belief and rules about what it looks like for us to have needs. Are they acceptable? Are they a burden? whose needs are more important? whose needs are we expected to meet? Who do we expect to meet our needs? How does it look for us to express our needs, and then maybe we even go through the process of trying to meet our needs. And we might get that, you know, afternoon off or that little bit of time away. And it didn't feel like it helped that much. And there's so many reasons why one of the big things is that we may have done something to respond to our bodies and our health and what we need. But we haven't really done something to respond to what our minds and our hearts need. We've gone through the motions, but our brain stayed plugged in to everything going on at home, that stress response still active. And we're still really operating from the same stories that got us here in the first place. So meeting our needs, it's hard, because it's also a commitment to the messy business of addressing what's in our minds in our hearts. And it's also the messy business of addressing our lives. Sometimes self care can be a distraction from our lives. And focusing on self care when what we really need to do is address the hurdles in our lives, it can just keep us in the state of bearable suffering. I shared a post on this a few years ago is self care the answer when motherhood sucks, I'll link that in the show notes. But what I've learned in that process is that self care could help me feel better, but I still wasn't addressing the issues underneath that were really impacting the stress in my life. So meeting our needs is more than just a checklist of things we physically need, you could have all your quote unquote, needs met. And you might still have that helpless or victim mindset, you could be approaching this with some martyrdom or some entitlement, you could still have things in your life that need to be addressed. And you're just going through the motions, and you will never feel that increasing capacity. At the end of it, you won't truly feel like your needs were met. In the next episode, I want to talk about this process we can go through from becoming aware of our needs, accepting them, and then learning how to meet our own needs. Because it isn't easy. And I would say in our culture, it's also not intuitive....

What are needs? At a basic level, they are simple things like food, water, shelter, sleep. They can also be more complicated, like friendship, personal accomplishment, and sense of purpose. Sometimes it can be difficult to meet these needs, or to even know what they are. Join me today while I discuss needs and how to meet them in all aspects of your life.

 

In this episode I discuss: 

What are your needs and how to figure that out 

Understanding your relationship to 'your needs' and 'the needs of others' 

Communal vs Individual cultures

What we learn about needs from our culture, our family, and how gender bias impacts our view on meeting our needs

Addressing needs in a relationship, expressing needs

Meeting the needs of others, how do we show up for this

 

All the fun links you might enjoy 

Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs (wikipedia)

Podcast playlist

Think the best of me: Hard and awesome

Capable or controlling

My husband put the groceries away wrong, he doesn’t love me

Instagram 

Simple Saturdays Email (sign up here)

Email me here

 

Sign up for the the Simple Saturdays email (a fun email, twice a month)

Email me here 

Follow me on Instagram

 

 

FULL TRANSCRIPT (unedited)

Hey friends, it's Shawna, your nerdy girlfriend and counselor from simple on purpose.ca. Welcome, welcome back to the podcast. Or maybe Welcome back to me, because it seemed that I was on a hiatus from sharing new episodes. And what happened is I had an episode ready to go. And I didn't post it. The other week, I shared this in the simple Saturdays email that I had just decided the content wasn't right. And sometimes this happens, sometimes, I'll go through the whole process of drafting up an episode, maybe even recording it and just deciding it's not the right content, not the right time, too much too little, that kind of thing. So now I'm back in the recording chair, which just a normal chair. But what I found is that I had to really listen to myself and give myself permission to not post that and take the risk that there wouldn't be this consistent content, which is always what we're told, we need to be doing sharing consistent content. And the reality is that it took me a while to get back to because my days are pretty full. And I was also sick for a while. As I was trying to get a new episode done, I was observing the sense of overwhelming me. And I was taking stock of what I'm doing with my days, versus what I'm expecting myself to do with my days. And I'm realizing that I am taking on more and more clients, and spending so much more time in those one on one sessions and in research for the sessions. That is time that in the past, I would easily spend researching and recording podcast episodes, I had time to do draft episodes and episodes that just never made the cut. Because that's the amount of time I have for that. This is a season for me, where those one to one sessions are really taking priority. But I do want to try my best to still show up here with new ideas new discussion, mainly because of the feedback you guys give me the messages you send me the Instagram DMS, you send me sharing that this podcast is of high value to you. And I want to keep offering that in ways that are sustainable for me. So if you're ever feeling like you want to hear a new episode, and I haven't brought one out, I do encourage you to scroll through past episodes because there's like, well over 100 there. I'm going to put links in the show notes of all the playlists that I have made. They're on Spotify, they're also on my website. And you can look up by topic of interest what you want to hear more about. There's habit change, slow living, emotional intelligence, minimalism, parenting on purpose. So I encourage you, if you ever like oh, I just want to hear more, go and listen to those. Funny enough here I was saying, Okay, I'm gonna have some time this morning, I'm going to draft up an episode, I was going to talk about one simple little thing, but it's turning into a series. And this series is going to be on meeting our needs meeting our needs. This is going to be a whole conversation because I think we all have different definitions on what that word even means what our needs. On one hand, we have those basic needs shelter, food, water rest, and we've probably all seen that pyramid the Hierarchy of Needs Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And Maslow moves up this hierarchy with these basic needs shelter, food, water, rest, and then safety and security, which I don't know, I feel like those would be on the same level. But there's these basic needs. Then there's the psychological needs belonging, love, friends, sense of accomplishment. And then at the very top, there's self actualization needs, which is reaching your potential. It's worth considering that Maslow drafted up these needs almost 100 years ago, and it isn't so much about what ranks were. But to understand that for most people, it can be a process of meeting that need before we can move up to the next one. And you know what, I even think we're living in an era where some people skip these stages. So what I take from this, ultimately, is that there are a set of needs, or at least to acknowledge that we as human have needs beyond the things that keep us merely alive. So when you think about what your own needs are, it's probably easy to say food, rest coffee, but anytime you hear yourself saying the sentence, I need a blank. I need a day off. I need time alone, I need help. We call those needs to don't we opening up this conversation. I think one of the most powerful insights you can give yourself is to explore what you have been raised with and assumed along the way about needs. What have you been taught about your needs? What assumptions have you created about your needs that are now playing out in adulthood? One part of this is considering the culture that you were raised in if your needs are considered communal, or individual and in most North American white culture, we are individualistic, and our individual needs take precedent over our communal needs and that is not a cultural experience that everyone has is worth considering that. It also depends on your home your family. If your needs were a burden a priority, whose more needs were more important, whose needs were less important. I'm going to give you a handful of examples to see how this might play out. Consider a situation where dad needs quiet when he gets home. So your needs for connection with him or even adventure or fun or loudness. Not acceptable, at least not when an authority figure is present. Or you had a lot of siblings or one particular sibling who needed a lot of support and attention. Your needs were put on the backburner you learned to help out instead of getting help, your needs mattered less other's needs mattered more. Perhaps you had a lot of emotions as a kid and your parent had really low tolerance or time or skill for this. So you learned your emotions are not in need. They're a burden, take them somewhere else or turn them off. What if you had siblings or even parents who were always in your stuff, and there was no enforcement of privacy or boundaries, you learned that you aren't entitled to those those aren't your needs to have privacy or boundary. And boundaries will ultimately become blurry people can cross them. What if you had the experience that you had a lot of desires and ideas and you wanted to try things or hobbies or dress a certain way or express yourself a certain way and you told that wasn't acceptable? You start to feel bad for who you are or for even launching that in the first place. You're told that's not acceptable. So you just shut off that desire. Consider the faith background you grew up with? And if you grew up as a Christian, what did you learn about needs? God provides everything you need. It makes you really question what needs even our this is a whole other conversation, right? And how about gender stereotypes? What did you learn about being a girl? And what are we taught about our needs, and meeting the needs of other what is the role of a girl of a woman? Often we're told, it means meeting the needs of others, especially in the family setting to be the mom and the wife. And all of that role should quote unquote, look like? I want to talk more about that in a later episode. Maybe you watched your own mom, and you watched how she met her needs. Maybe she was staying up all night doing the laundry working long hours, you learn a framework of what a mums needs are and are not. And maybe you've watched your parents and how they handled their needs. And you want to be counterintuitive to that. And maybe you felt a problem with that. So you've almost rebelled against that. Our upbringing greatly shapes our view on our needs. What needs are actual needs? What needs are a burden? What needs are more important? What are the needs we should be meeting for others? What needs do we expect others to meet for us? How should we ask for what we need so on? The next question that we are faced with from this is now what do we do with our needs as adults? Maybe we ignore them, bury them, don't express them don't address them. Maybe we even disparage our needs, calling them selfish or childish. Often, if we're in this state, we ignore them so much. It takes some really big emotions like resentment to help us see that we have these needs that are going unmet. We could be on the other end of the spectrum where everything feels like a need. We are really good at rationalizing them. Well, I need this because and we're very hyper focused on all the thing we perceive as needs, that it almost becomes a daily discussion, what we need and how to get it. And what about that internal wrestling that we meet in the middle? As a culture, we're talking about needs and mental health and more and more....

Giving your child extra attention might seem like a great idea, but if it’s the wrong type of attention it could do more harm than good. Let’s learn what it means to parent intentionally and make proactive connections with your family. 

 

Products recommended here may include referral links to Amazon. If you click through and buy something I may earn a commission, at no cost to you. 

 

In this episode I discuss: 

Why we get stuck in the negative

Our negativity bias as parents

Your experience of motherhood

The Nurtured Heart approach

How to use this approach on 'difficult' kids

 

All the fun links you might enjoy: 

Is momlife unfun? How to be a more fun mom, to stop withholding fun from yourself 

More on the negativity bias

When I stopped enjoying my kids

Change your motherhood experience by changing how you make memories

Why you aren’t thriving in motherhood (stress and surviving)

Conscious parenting through the struggles, and letting go of perfectionism in motherhood

Transforming the Difficult Child: the Nurtured Heart Approach 

Article on Nurtured Heart Approach 

Do you typecast your kids? (Labels and how they impact our parenting and our kids)

Check out the episode playlists for your topic of interest right here

 

Simple pleasure links

The wordle (also search wordle unlimited for more)

The heardle (also search heardle unlimited)

Spot the difference site (click explorer games for more variety and levels)

Highlights hidden pictures book

Spot the difference brain games book 

Sign up for the the Simple Saturdays email (a fun email, twice a month)

 

Full transcript (unedited)

0:18

So friends around here, I like to talk about all the ways that we can turn off the autopilot living, just living reactively by default for me, it looked like a lot of complacency and step into doing things on purpose with intention, getting clear and focused on where we want to go and taking steps to get there. Today we're going to talk about intentional parenting, just parenting in general, but doing it with intention. And the topic of focus can come up in parenting, when we start thinking, what are we focusing on? What gets the most attention, what gets our most attention in a single day, what gets our attention as a parent. And I don't know if you're like me, but it can go to demands and the urgency who needs to be aware what needs to happen, what needs to be cooked, who's eating one of the eating, where the eating, and it's like, we're just directors of all of this. And of course, as our kids get older, we can start to give them ownership of this and they can start self directing. But our attention in a given day, it can really be given mostly to the problems at hand, stop shouting Sydney, clean up your mess, put that away. And I know that there are seasons of my own motherhood, where I don't even want to talk anymore, because I'm just sick of hearing myself talk. And then I start to think, man, my kids aren't really listening to me, I don't really want to listen to me either.

1:38

They don't have such a bad idea about this, after all. Anyways, this is a really common place that we can find ourselves in as parents, a season of no a season of constant correction, a season of constant discipline. And then instead of motherhood, feeling like this enjoyable experience, it feels like a perpetual power struggle. And there's this urgency and every day is just full of problems that we feel we cannot solve. So if you are here, welcome. Yeah, we are all here. Sometimes, some of us get stuck here. And we get stuck here for a few good reasons. Actually, we get stuck here, we start to live in this story. And this becomes the emotional habit we operate from. And I'll tell you why it kind of makes sense. We get stuck here because on one hand, the more we're thinking this the stories, the more we're feeling these emotions, we get some very strong neural connections that are being formed. But the more we do it, the more we do it, this becomes our new default. And this is what they mean when they say neuroplasticity, we're rewiring the brain, from the state we're operating from consistently. So if we are in this state all day long of seeing problems and coming at our day from frustration, that's going to become a very strong neural connection in our brain, it's going to become our new emotional habit. And the other reason why this kind of makes sense that we get stuck here is our brain has a negativity bias. It is biased, our brain is biased, in lots of ways, like just look up brain bias. And you're gonna see lots of different brain biases that we have their filters, their filters we put on things. And the negativity bias means that we pay more intention, more attention to what could go wrong and negative experiences because that is filed under important things in our brains. That just harkens back crickets back.

3:26

It's like we're singing Christmas carols that goes back to our primal need of needing to stay safe. So if we are, you know, generations ago, we were focused on the dangers ahead of us and what could go wrong. And learning from those dangers and paying attention to those dangers, we're more likely going to stay alive. And over the generations this has kept us safe. This negativity bias has kept us safe in the world. But now we live in a world that is full of perceived threats instead of real ones. And that negativity bias sister like No, everything's important. We need to pay attention to what could go wrong and the negative things. So all this to say it makes sense when we get stuck here.

4:06

And we get stuck here. Sometimes motherhood feels like all we are doing is shuffling people places and making food and folding laundry and reprimanding and disciplining.

4:16

And to me, this becomes a problem for me, because it starts to ruin my experience of motherhood.

4:24

Your experience of motherhood matters, the memories you're making the emotions you're feeling the stories that you have about your own motherhood that matters. I'll make sure to link some episodes about this where I've talked in the past on these kinds of concepts. So one of them being when I stopped enjoying my kids, which is the most searched for post on my site. By the way. I want to talk about all this today because I stumbled across something that's been helping me a lot and I want to share it with you if you also feel a little bit stuck in this type of season of motherhood. So I was listening to a therapy podcast and a therapist was sharing something called the nurtured heart approach.

5:00

which led me to their website, which led me to their book. And the book is called Transforming the difficult child. And I have, by definition of the bucket, a difficult child. So I was like, Yeah, I think I really need this, this whole approach, I need this book. The nurtured heart approach is something that they teach not just to parents, but to anybody who who's working with kids. So maybe you work with kids, and it's like a youth leader, maybe you're a school counselor, maybe you're a teacher, maybe you're a coach. And this book can be really helpful. They've shared lots of examples on their website about how it's helped in these kinds of communal kids settings. But it's also really helpful for parents of kids with a DD and ADHD. And the general sense of the approach is to give more attention to the positive and less attention to the negative. I titled this episode, don't water the weeds, and that's the concept that the book offers, don't wander the weeds.

5:55

However, we find ourselves naturally in this stages parenting, right? This can be a natural stance for us to water, the weeds.

6:05

Pay more attention to the negative and less attention to the positive. Right? That's what we're doing. Because addressing the negative feels really important to our brains, to our survival to our peace. Are we giving a lot of attention to the positive? What do we do when our kids are being good?

6:22

I think my gut reaction is to go and take a break for myself. Because I have just spent so much emotional energy correcting and threatening and prompting, well, I don't really use threats anymore. But I do feel like there's a lot of emotional exhaustion that gets expended on just focusing on those negative things. And so now, if my kids are doing something that I would view as positive, they're like, maybe being nice together, and change, I think, finally, I'm gonna go do something that makes me feel nice, which I mean, that's a whole other discussion we can have, right? Like what we're doing to give ourselves a break. So think about where your energy is going. As a parent, where's your focus going as a parent, I think a lot of us give a lot of energy to the negative. And the nurtured heart approach explains that our kids, especially those who are considered intense kids, they crave our connection, they crave our attention. And that connection is felt in the energy we expend towards them. So the more energy, the more connection and it would go to follow that if our kids want our attention in our connection, we are kind of teaching them that the best way to get our energy and our attention is to be doing something negative. They kind of learned that it's not that they're being outright manipulative, it's that they genuinely want our attention and connection. And they've learned Now the easiest way to get it, the most intense energy comes from that negative reaction, the warnings, the lectures, the reprimands a watching them like a hawk, when we tell them not to do something just to see if they'll do it. The bigger the power struggle, the higher the energy, we are watering weeds all day. And then what's happening, what happens to our kids, when they have this experience. They're acting in ways to get that reaction from us....

Motivation. It is something we all want more of. However, every day we take little actions and make little choices that are coming from motivation. A motivation to avoid something or a motivation to move towards something. And why does it matter what is motivating us?

 

 

In this episode:

Motivation vs lack of motivation

How to know when you are operating from AWAY motviation

Spotting the victim mindset or scarcity mindset

How to know when you are operating from TOWARDS motivation

Motivation and abundance mindset

 

 

 

 

Mentioned in this episode:

The group coaching call, Feb 2 2023

The Making Change Challenge, sign up here for the four lessons and worksheets

Send me a message on Instagram

Share your thoughts with the Facebook group 

The Enneagram and Motherhood series

Making motherhood harder than it needs to be (Mom Martyr)

The not-enough mindset (scarcity and abundance)

 

 

Full Transcript (unedited)

0:00

Hey friends, welcome back is Shawna, your nerdy girlfriend and counsellor from simple on purpose.ca. So you might have figured out that this podcast is a biweekly podcast. But last week, I dropped a bonus episode about not knowing what you want in life. And I talked about six reasons why dreaming or thinking of your life on purpose might actually be hard. I wanted to share that episode early so that you could have time to sign up for the group coaching call on February 2, if that's something you're interested in, I'll link info on that in the show notes. And essentially, that call is a time where you can bring the work you want to do with intentional living this year. And I'll answer any of your questions and also bring people on live for coaching. In the past, I've run group programs, I used to run the life on purpose Academy, back in 2020, and then ran a couple group programs in 2021, I took a little bit of a break. And now I'm thinking of unique and different ways to bring that group coaching aspect back into things. Because in my own experience of being part of group programs is just listening to other people just hearing their questions answered, you get so much value, even though it might not be the exact same issue. Just the themes are relevant, and the approaches can be applied in so many different ways. So I find a lot of value in those. Also, I just really love hanging out with you guys. I love that community aspect. I'm always looking for ways to encourage community amongst you, listeners and blog readers. So I'll link that in the show notes. If you're interested. I wanted to follow that up with one more episode of ideas and approaches to help you be really mindful about the future that you're creating. So I wanted to share on the topic of motivation, because motivation is kind of like how do you feel with that word? How does your body feel? Motivation is something we're always trying to get. Because we know how we act when we feel motivated. When we feel motivated, we get things done. So our approach to getting things done is to find motivation, manufacture motivation, harness motivation. But as the wonderful Mel Robbins has taught us, you won't always feel like it. And if you listen to how you feel when it comes to what you want, you will not get it, because you won't always feel like it. So I'm going to share today a portion of some training that I've done on two types of motivation that is towards motivation and away motivation. And this is from the making change challenge that I released this time three years ago. And it is a series of four audio lessons and worksheets that I walk you through. It's a free challenge. So I'll link that in the show notes if that's something you're interested in signing up for and using. So we're gonna listen to this brief training on motivation. And I really want you to pay attention as you're listening to understanding what is motivating you right now. What is motivating how you show up and the things you chase in your life. Knowing this can help you know where you're ready to make a shift. All right, here it is.

3:16

Hey, friends, I'm glad you're back for Lesson four of the making change challenge. So this is the final lesson. And in this challenge, we have covered Getting Started how a fixed mindset can hold you back. And then we've talked about taking the next step and knowing where you actually have the ability to change things. What are you actually in control of changing the last lesson we talked about breaking down your goals and habits into doable chunks. And now I want to talk about the feeling that you are in action, you are making change things are happening. And you might feel really ready from all of this information to take action. You're looking at your life in a new way you're looking at yourself in a new way. And whenever we feel motivated, it is a fantastic feeling. But often are motivated feelings don't come at the most convenient time like Is anyone else a genius in the shower. I usually have this quiet moment where I solve my problems or have this like a ha moment. And I have to run out of the shower dripping wet and just like start typing into my computer to unload it from my brain. And as we've covered in the first lessons, our actions are prompted by our feelings. And when we feel motivated, then we take action in line with these feelings. When we don't feel motivated. We take action in line with this lack of motivation which usually means no action or ineffective action. unless we are willing to use willpower to override this but we all know how far willpower gets us not very far. And then remember that our thoughts produce our feelings. So the thoughts we think are actually what truly motivate us or demotivate us. But how often do we stop and investigate our thoughts to see if we are being motivated in really healthy and life giving ways? Maybe this is the first time that you We're considering the possibility that you can be motivated in an unhealthy way. So, I want to let you know about these two main types of motivation which motivation is actually that internal dialogue we have that is prompting us to act. So the two types of motivation are away and towards, also called avoidant and approach and sometimes even called negative and positive, the avoidant or away motivation is when you are motivated by the desire to avoid to move away from pain or conflict or discomfort, you are taking action as a way to avoid, prevent or repair, conflict and discomfort. It can take a lot of forms, and it can also be very subtle to over the years, I have experienced this type of motivation a lot in my parenting, where I am motivated by the anxiety of things going wrong, or the desire to just make the noise stop or to just get a break. My actions had constantly been an effort to fix the chaos or to prevent the chaos. And if you are familiar with the Enneagram, and I'll link it in the lesson plan. This is very common to the type nine which I am. The thing is I'm not usually very much fun when I'm in this mode. And often I'll look to my husband Connor to talk me down and step in. Because I don't want to be motivated by anxiety, it doesn't feel good. I want to be motivated by enjoyment and presence. That's the way I want to parent. When we are operating from away motivation. It doesn't feel good. It feels like putting out fires or hustling it feels exhausting. And we often burn out from it. This is because we are operating from the stress response part of our brain, the part of our brain, the amygdala that sends as possible danger, and it wants us to fight flight or freeze. It is taking over operation and releasing stress hormones to prompt us into action. To know if you are operating in the away motivation. Pay attention to how you feel when you are in action. Is there a victim mentality? Do you feel stressed? Do you feel like everyone is getting in your way or like nobody is supporting you? This is because we are operating with the mindset that says we have to do these things or we should carry out these tasks. And it takes away our ownership and control of the situation. It puts us in the victim mode, negative self talk, listen to yourself talk. Are you shaming yourself or berating yourself, your inner dialogue can be really detrimental to you ever making lasting change when you are using guilt, shame or fear to motivate you. And the hard part here is that those are powerful motivators. And sometimes they are even necessary or useful. Like when we have actually wronged someone and want to fix it. Or when there is like real actual danger, we should address that. But when we misuse them, then they are a trap of perpetual crappy feelings, poor self image, and they keep us in a state of being reactive to our life instead of being proactive with our life. And the third marker is the scarcity mindset. If you sit back and watch your thoughts, do you have a scarcity mindset? And to recap, if you haven't heard this before, the scarcity mindset says that there isn't enough time there isn't enough friends, there is enough energy there isn't enough. I am not enough, I don't have enough, I don't know enough, etc, etc. and I'll link in the lesson notes, a podcast episode that explains this with more detail. On the flip side, there is towards motivation. This is the motivation that allows you to move closer to the things you value, enjoy and desire. You are moving towards the positive things you crave. This is why I always encourage women to outline their values and their vision, because they need to know where they want to go and how they want to show up in order to use the positive motivation that will move us towards this. And if you want help with that I'll link the life on purpose workbook. Or the free worksheets you can use either one to help you with this towards motivation is empowering. Because it is tied to thoughts like I get to do this, I want to do this,...

I want to talk to you about listening more deeply to yourself and asking, "what do I want?". For some of us, we are out of touch with our dreams or our life vision. We might feel overwhelmed, or like it is impractical, or like we have failed too much in the past. This episode is to help you see some of the ways you might be stuck with listening to your own dreams and ideas, and some tips on moving through that. 

 

“A ship is safe in the harbour but that is not what ships are for” - source unknown, probably John A Shedd

 "You have to show up before inspiration will." - James Clear

 

Products recommended here may include referral links to Amazon. If you click through and buy something I may earn a commission, at no cost to you. 

 

In this episode I discuss: 

Listening to yourself on a deep level and on a surface level

Six reasons why it might be hard to know your dreams and goals

Giving yourself permission to have dreams and ideas and goals

Being a mom who struggles to dream and feels selfish to have goals

Learning to inspire yourself

 

All the fun links you might enjoy 

Six signs you are living on autopilot

Are you too comfortable? And what is it costing you?

Are you trading in peace for relief?

The joy of being mediocre

Redefine the life you want and what success looks like

Hurdles to being a mom who has dreams and hobbies

What you can learn from imposter syndrome

For the mom waiting for life to happen 

Dreaming for the non-dreamer, from A Little Light 

Join me on Instagram 

 

Sign up for the Feb 2nd Group Coaching Call - open to anyone who has questions or would like coaching on this topic and the topic of creating your future

Sign up for Simple Saturdays email (a fun email, twice a month)

 

Full transcript (unedited)

0:00

Hey friends, it's Shawna, your nerdy girlfriend and counselor from simpleonpurpose.ca

If you are joining us for the new year, if you just started searching like intentional living or living life on purpose or goals or something, and you found this podcast, welcome, I'm so glad you're here. Just to give you the quick and fast context, I am a mom of three kids who are now 1110, and eight. And around here we talk about ways to simplify your home, your heart and your life. So that so that you can show up for your life and live your life on purpose, live it intentionally live it with peace and purpose and presence and enjoy it. This episode is a follow up to the last one on creating your future and how we actually have the power to create our future when we turn off the autopilot. And some of the main points to notice in that episode were that we're really conditioned on how we show up in the world. And we really live from that condition. So everything we learned from our upbringing, from our past informs what we believe is possible, what is acceptable, what is safe, what to pursue. And so essentially, really, our past everything we learned in our past how we've shown up in our past, it dictates how we show up for our future, our past dictates our future, when we're living on autopilot that is, but we have this part of our brain, when we are in a calm state we can access it is that part that allows us to think logically long term, big picture ideas. It's that part that says, Wait a minute, if I have ketchup, chips, and whiskey each night, where will that get me in five years? Is that where I want to be? Or sit? Is that part of our brain that says, I usually go through the day in a fog? I don't feel like I'm present with my kids. Is that what I want? And then what do I want? How do I want to show up as a mom, that's kind of the part of our brain that we get to tap into when we shut off the autopilot, we shut off the stress, the anxiety, and we just be still for a minute, I do have an episode from the past called Signs, you might be on autopilot, living on autopilot. And I'll make sure to link that in the show notes. But really, it's all about shutting off the autopilot for a second in opening the door to intentional living living on purpose, where we start to consider what life could be what we want it to be. And over the years for myself doing this work, I've used this analogy of me being a ship. And I really think it's because I heard this quote, when I started doing this work, and the quote is a ship is safe in the harbor. But that's not what ships are for. I would like to tell you who said that quote, but I've searched it up. And there's like four different people that it is attributed to. So I'm not too sure. But that quote, It really came to me at a time where I was becoming aware that I had built up my life on desire to just have comfort and ease and maybe not always in the peaceful sense, but definitely in the relief sense, where I just don't have to deal with the conflict or doing the hard thing, which of course, in the long run does not really result in a life of comfort and ease. But a life of things swept under the rug and a life of avoiding the hard thing and then being faced with the harder thing in the long run. I'll put a couple episodes in the show notes that kind of dig more into comfort, peace and relief, those kinds of concepts. And as I was becoming aware, I think and for most of all of us that we are living in a way that just helps us through cope much of life. And I think around 30 is when we become painfully aware that our coping habits that helped us to survive the earlier parts of life and kind of get through and manage and feel okay, and feel acceptable. They're now the source of much of our suffering, and we need a new way. So we have this gap where we start to consider what the new way could be. And so today, I want to talk about this new way, I want to talk to you about listening more deeply to yourself and asking, What do I want? And I think there's two approaches we can take to this on one. Considering that big draw you feel deep down inside? What do your bones ache for? What does your heart grown for? This can be a hard one to name to put a label to it. But I think you can sense it, I think it has a sense. You can sense how it feels or what color it is or the sound of it or the sight of it, you can almost feel that inner sense. And I would just encourage you don't be in a rush to figure this one out. Just acknowledge that there is something there some inner draw inner desire, that is a longing in you and I think let yourself stop and feel that from time to time remember what it feels like to feel that inner longing for something. The other way to think about it, which is what we mostly think about when we think about our life on purpose or a dreams or goals is what we can name what we can pursue what we know we would enjoy in our life what we know we need more of in our life. and over my years of pursuing goals and habits and vision, I see it shifting over the years, even my career has shifted over the years. And I would encourage you with this approach to learning what you want and dream about, is to keep in mind, you don't have to have it all figured out. Because things will shift seasons shift, you shift, you get to learn a little bit more, you get to try something different, the work isn't so much about seeing a clear path. And taking all the right steps to get there. The work is to become someone who takes the next step on the path and gives yourself permission to sometimes try other paths. But we do need to start somewhere we are a ship, we need the destination, we're going to allow for detours and hurdles. But we do need to get out of the harbor, knowing what we want can sometimes just be the hurdle. And I've mentioned the life on purpose workbook. And I've got free worksheets as well, that will walk you through the nine areas of your life, and help you set up for some vision that you want in those areas. And I've heard women over the years share that they've uncovered ideas and dreams and values that they weren't consciously aware of for themselves. So this can really be an exciting time, where you give yourself permission to dream, you carve away some time, some space to actually do that work. And when I say dream, I want to, I want you to know, I mean, the whole range from that feeling of big idea for what you want in life, like build a house or travel this place with my kids or start a business. But I also mean the simplest things, the little goals, the little habits, you want to build the hobbies that bring you joy, the people that you want to surround yourself with and build friendships with. So I do want to kind of come into this conversation about taking the pressure off yourself, you don't have to get it all figured out. And to also take the pressure on yourself on just thinking about the simplest little things that you desire in your life, and allowing space for the big things you desire in your life. Because ultimately, who I'm talking to today is for those of you who aren't excited or who feel overwhelmed, or who feel lost, or who feel like you don't have dreams, or maybe you don't even want to have dreams. And I want to talk about the reasons why you might feel like this and what you could try to do about it. So the first one we kind of mentioned is we make this huge, big thing, and then it becomes overwhelming. You might think sure I have a dream, I'm going to quit my life here, I'm going to move my family to a hot Beach, I'm going to spend my life swimming with my kids and running a little Etsy store. Some dreams just feel so big. And it can feel overwhelming. And when we're overwhelmed, we shut down and we don't really think about how we can break things into steps. The other way we make our dreaming way too big and overwhelming is expecting perfection. I encourage you to dial everything back. Start with the simple things, things that aren't heavy. Start with doing the work of becoming somebody who is working towards something bigger,...

With 2023 finally here, it is time to start looking forward to the future and improve our health, relationships, and life. But sometimes it might be a good idea to look inwards as well and see if we intend to succeed in those goals passively, or actively. Kickstart the year by turning off the autopilot and living life intentionally.

 

Products recommended here may include referral links to Amazon. If you click through and buy something I may earn a commission, at no cost to you. 

 

In this episode I discuss: 

Taking charge of your own future 

Advice to live life intentionally

How our past affects our future, and how to use that in the present

The compound effect of our habits 

Three things you can do to help shape your future

 

All the fun links you might enjoy 

Throw Throw Burrito (on Amazon)

Change your experience by how you make memories in motherhood (episode link)

Think the best of me, or not (embracing our hard and awesome)

Making motherhood harder than it needs to be (mom martyr post)

Our marriage was struggling, here are 12 things that helped (blog post)

I’ve been living on autopilot (a post from 2015 on working through the frustration of waking up to a complacent life)

For the mom who is waiting for life to happen (how waiting keeps us from taking action)

Six things nobody told me about Intentional Living (when it is hard work to be intentional, but it is worth it)

What will change cost you? Paying the status quo or investing in change (episode link)

What we say about ourselves, and why it matters (self-limiting identity)

Small things that can change your whole life (how I applied the compound effect to my life)

Life on Purpose Workbook

Live your vision worksheets

Live your values worksheets 

Sign up for Simple Saturdays email (a fun email, twice a month)

 

FULL TRANSCRIPT (unedited)

0:11

Hello friends, happy 2023 Welcome back to the simple on purpose podcast. I am Shawna, your nerdy girlfriend and counselor, here to walk with you through all things about simplifying your home, your heart, your life, and living it on purpose. For us here in Canada, in my house, we celebrated Christmas over the holiday. My husband had time off, I had time off, like for real time off. And in the like, 11 years of motherhood. This was one of the few Christmases where I felt like I had a truly great time. So weird. I mean, of course, plans got cancelled. I got sick kids complained siblings thought the house was a mess. There was tears, there was feelings, mine included. But I don't know, maybe it's because I was really trying to have eyes for those really great moments. And you know, maybe because we also spent so much time with friends. I think that was really important. We spent a lot of time with our friends and our kids friends. We played games as a family mostly throw throw burrito, have you played that it's a card game. But then you like stopped to take these dodgeball battles. And I have a friend who said they eventually gave that game away because it was traumatic for her household. And I get it because just last night, I had a tantrum. I think all of us have rotated, taking turns having tantrums playing Throw, throw burrito. But it is so fun. I'll link that in the show notes. So for me, as a mom, this Christmas had a lot of just simple, great memories, time that we spent together time we spent with friends. And this is a Christmas I'm going to definitely write about in my memory book. So I have a memory book I keep where I write down the really great things that I want to kind of make up my experience of motherhood. I'll link an episode I've done on that in the past two years, about making memories and motherhood if you want to check that out. So we're coming into the new year, maybe you celebrated Christmas maybe celebrated something else, maybe you didn't don't celebrate anything over the winter break. But you probably aren't free from the new year new me culture that seems to seep into most continents, I think, to some extent, in the simple Saturday's email that I shared. winter holiday is often a time where we try to do three things we try to rest, we try to reflect on the year past. And we try to set intention for the new year ahead. And I really want to encourage you that you can do all three of those without making them feel like a chore and obligation or a performance. And you can do them in simple and really gentle ways. In the simple Saturdays email, I also shared that I think we are edging into a new approach as a society with how we approach resolutions and change. And I think it's a little bit more humane, a little bit more gentle. If you saw my little rant in there, it's probably not written from the perspective of a white middle to upper class and men who don't have the same life demands or life dreams that many of us do. I think, for us, especially a stay at home moms, we really try to smash our life and who we should be and how we should be living into this checklist of productivity hacks that have been sold to us over the years by such prominent men, and they worked for them, but I don't think they work for everyone. And so I do see this shift that takes into account that we as a person, if we're wanting to pursue change, and or even the change, we want to be like who we want to become that we don't have to be this perfected checklist of an ideal, ideal human that we don't have to be, nor can we be it. I'm going to link the heart and awesome episode. And that's more on embracing your heart and not letting your ego trick you into thinking that we need to be perceived as awesome all the time. So those links will be in the show notes. There's going to be a lot of links in the show notes as we go along. I have like many pages of notes for this episode. So you're on a bit of a ride with me, I might try to break it up into smaller episodes. So come along for the journey. See what happens. I don't even know. Ultimately, you can also sign up for the simple Sadler Saturday's email in the show notes as well. That is our original coffee date. It goes out twice a month. And it's a place where I give a lot of prompts a lot of thoughts, a lot of ideas, and a lot of links of things that I've just written over like the decade where I've been blogging and podcasting and sharing all of this stuff. So I definitely recommend it. It is a it's a fun email.

4:39

So today I want to talk about what your future will be. What do you want your future to be? What do you if you imagine does it feel different? Does it feel slightly different? If you imagine your future do you maybe have no clue? Or maybe you just kind of say I'll just see I'll wait and see and that's what it will be. What it is is what it will be

5:00

I don't know it yet. And they shared a little bit in the November episode about how decluttering led me to see my complacency, just complacent in so many areas of my life, not just how I was managing and feeling in my home, my health was struggling, I was really out of touch with my body, especially what childbirth had done to it. I was eating protein bars, drinking coffee, and wine, of course, had my emotional support waffles, all the waffles all of the time. My motherhood was really on a reactive autopilot mode, I wasn't intentional at all, I felt overwhelmed. That turned me into a mom, martyr, I really had a story that I wasn't a capable mom. And if my kids were unhappy, or they were upset about something, I really made it mean that I was doing things wrong. As a mom, you can see how I really set myself up for a lot of suffering a lot of sense of failure, which you can imagine had an impact on my marriage, because every marriage has a dance. And at that time, ours was me being anxious, which made me controlling, and him withdrawing. So it really created a very unproductive atmosphere of resentment. Ultimately, my world felt small, it felt stuck. And like I said, as I was decluttering, and seeing where I was complacent, it led me to this realization that I wasn't in charge of my life. This was me. I wasn't in the driver's seat, I wasn't going anywhere I wanted to go. And that sense that like, Oh, this is this is me, like, I'm doing this. I felt like I was stepping into this strange and scary and exciting place of ownership over my, over my life. And so off, I went to wander through the wilderness desert of intentional living.

6:51

Here we go, living life on purpose.

6:55

I recently had a conversation with a woman who I think is older than me. And she relayed to me her recent awareness that we are, in fact, in charge of our own futures. And I was kind of taken aback at how floored she was to realize this. And then I remember, like I was there, I was just there not too long ago. And I wanted to tell everyone, hence simple on purpose coming into existence.

7:20

I was watching love his blind before Christmas. And if you haven't seen it, it's on Netflix. It is where a set of women and a set of men live in this compound for 10 solid days, they go on blind dates with one another, with the whole goal of finding someone to marry. And it is blind in the sense that they are separated by a wall. So they can only talk to one another, they cannot see each other.

7:41

So they spend hours just talking to each other. And the days go on, they spend more and more time with that one or two people they feel really connected with because their whole job is to find a spouse. So they're going to start talking about really deep conversations around compatibility, marriage, all of those things. And at the end of these 10 days, they decide have I found my soulmate? Do I want to get engaged. And if they say, yes, they want to get engaged, they meet for the first time, and they go live together for four weeks and plan their wedding. And then they decide at the altar, if they will marry this person,...

With all the planning, gift wrapping, baking, and decorating, this time of year can get crazy, and life seems to just stop until the 25th is well behind us. Today I wanted to talk about the concept of Hygge and how to make Christmas feel a little simpler, a little more manageable, and a little more enjoyable. And put this all against the backdrop of the stress response we can find ourselves in as mothers. Understanding the concept of the Window of Tolerance can give you more awareness over times when you feel little capacity for daily life and seem to run on overwhelm and stress. 

 

In this episode I discuss: 

The three components of Hygge

Holiday activities and how to get the family involved

Decluttering Christmas

Our Window of Tolerance 

 

All the fun links you might enjoy 

All posts and episodes about Simple Christmas

Posts and episodes on hygge

30 days of hygge free calendar

Enneagram + Motherhood series

Enneagram 101 post and episode 

CBC Gem 

Why you aren’t thriving in motherhood (stress and surviving)

Episode playlist on emotional intelligence for moms 

An intro to polyvagal theory (window of tolerance)

Infographic on the window of tolerance

Reactive vs proactive approach to the day

Simple Christmas Planner

Simple Saturdays email

 

Sign up for Simple Saturdays email (a fun email, twice a month)

 

 

 

FULL TRANSCRIPT (unedited)

 

0:15

Welcome to the simple on purpose podcast. Around here we talk about ways that you can simplify your home, your heart and your life. So that you can remove all the distractions, all of the clutter, all of the excess, and just show up for the stuff that really matters the most to you the stuff that is really important to you. So as I was preparing for the podcast this week, I was drafting up a podcast on goals and visions and creating a future you love. And then I was like, if I heard this right now in the middle of Christmas, I don't think I would even be listening to it. Because like kind of just stops around Christmas, right? Which I don't mind. I really love the idea of hibernating a little. I think it really honors this season that we're in we when we can step back from that pace of summer and spring and kind of pay attention to what nature is doing and model it a little bit flow with it and let ourselves hibernate a little bit more. So there's my soapbox moment, let's all hibernate a little bit more this winter.

Which brings me to the notion of Hygge I'm probably going to use the word 'hoo-ga' nd 'hyg' interchangeably, but it is pronounced hygge. You guys are asking me about it right now you want me to talk about this. So here we go. In December, I often talk about simplifying your Christmas. But all of that content is out there. I am going to link to the simple Christmas series in the show notes, where I talk about simplifying gift giving traditions, giving kids toys without feeling overrun with clutter, how to make your gifts more thoughtful, all those basics, they're covered. So I thought I would just expand into a different direction on things that help you feel like your Christmas is simpler and cozier and maybe more manageable, more enjoyable.

So the first thing we'll talk about is hygge, which is a Danish word that doesn't have any direct English translation and it just embodies this atmosphere of simplicity, of being cozy of being with others togetherness and of contentment.

I think we've all seen especially on Pinterest, the stock images of a woman she's like draped on her white couch or her white bed. She's got a long white knit sweater on cozy Christmas socks. I don't know, do her legs get cold, I don't know. Mind read. She's holding a mug of tea and there's a fluffy blanket like draped around her.

And that's what they tell us who got is we might not think of a mum in her like old decade old house code and slippers, drinking her magnesium water at the end of the night, sitting on the couch, watching a Netflix show with subtitles on it listening to the dryer in the basement. It's not as trendy right. And that's the thing is, hygge isn't decor trend. It's more of an approach and approach to living. And I think it's an approach we naturally gravitate towards in winter. When we kind of want to nest inside we want to slow down we want to recharge we want to, I don't know, enjoy some simple indulgences and just be with our people.

And hygge can be a really great filter to help you do that. So let's talk about kind of the three components. One is getting cozy, slowing down, getting cozy, making your space cozy, making yourself cozy. The second one is connectedness, making time to connect with the people around you. Maybe even doing activities that make you feel connected and contentment. Doing simple things. Don't overcomplicate it don't feel like you have to do every craft on your Pinterest Christmas craft board.

This is an approach that I heard about, I don't know, eight or nine years ago, and I decided I'm doing like that way. That's how I want to do life, which I think appeals to most type nines and I'm a type nine on the Enneagram if that feels relatable to you. Welcome fellow Type nines. Over the years I've written just a few posts on hygge because I don't think it needs to be expanded on a ton. I think the core concepts are there for us. But I do also have a printable list of ways that you can hook up in the cold months. And I'll link that in the show notes.

But I thought it might be fun just to talk about some of the ways I noticed that we bring hygge into our Christmas even specifically this year, because it's always nice to hear ideas. And then if you're looking for ideas, and maybe you'll like one, maybe you'll even spark some of your own your own spin on it.

The first one is a little bonfire, a little bonfire so cozy any fire really cozy. The other week my husband was cleaning up some stuff around the yards and the carports and he was burning some old wood and had this fire going and it's dark around like fourth four o'clock here. So we can see the fire glowing, it's in the back of our yard. And he sends out my daughter and her friend to go put more wood in and so they're just tossing it out there and we're watching them from the kitchen window and we noticed they're just hanging out there they're not coming back in. So kind of when it got them chairs and blankets and they just hung out there and we We thought it was just the sweetest we were like taking videos of them, sending them to her mom. And we just thought it was the cutest, most cozy little moment. And I think anytime you have a fire pit or fireplace or can go out of town to a friend's or the lake have a winter bonfire, I think they're just such a simple way of slowing you down, you just slow down around a fire. And it's just such a nice place to connect. You don't feel pressured to like, do anything or be entertained, you can just hang out. Plus bonus, if you bring wieners it counts as dinner.

The other thing that I noticed, and I think most people who are into hygge will notice this about themselves is bringing in lots of lighting. And Christmas is just an easy time to rely on mood lighting, especially as it gets darker earlier. And I've spent the last number of years really just acquiring decorations that light up. I think that's what I'm drawn to when it comes to Christmas decor, string lights, electric candles, little light up houses. And every afternoon, I put those lights on and it just feels cozy. It creates a nice glow in the house. It's one of my most favorite visually calming scenarios for myself. Another one is Advent activities. And I think a lot of us try to bring in some sort of countdown.

6:16

I think it can be something that you overdo or something that feels more manageable with the family. So pay attention to how you're feeling about your Advent activities.

One thing that happened here is we pulled out the Christmas decorations this year. And I realized at the end of last year, on sale, I bought an Advent house. So it's this cute little really thick cardboard house. And each day has a drawer that you pull out. So you can put something in this little drawer and this little box. And it was like the third of December, something when we unpacked all this and I realized, oh, I don't have anything, I haven't even thought of what I'm going to put in these. I'm sure when I bought it, I had some great brainstorm. But here I was. So I put some jelly beans in the day, thought about putting the kids vitamins in there. But that would be really disappointed with it. So I asked around on Instagram for ideas on how we could use this Advent like box system. And what we ended up doing was each person in the house, took some boxes off of it, looked at the calendar and then wrote on a little post it note an idea of an activity or some trivia or a song that we would do in there just really simple ideas. They're so simple.

But what I noticed about them is it creates gathering for us where we read it together, or we do the event together. And I think it's also important with any kind of holiday in your family to get your kids ideas on what they want to do more on what would be fun for them. And so having them write their own ideas on there, I think it's really great way to make them feel included. Of course, we always have that additional conversation when winter break comes, what do you want to do? What should we go do like skating sledding, get their input, which is also a really hygge approach to have this egalitarian sense of family structure.

The other one is side by side activities. One of the best ways to just be together with no pressure to have a conversation. You're not face to face. You can have some music on you can just be beside one another is side by side activities. Puzzles are my favorite way to do this....