I want to invite you on a journey with me. Not something I have mastered, but something I am still working through. It all started with breakfast. It was taking too long to get breakfast on the table each morning. I am not putting extravagant meals together. Some days it was just frozen waffles, but it seemed to take 30-40 minutes to finally sit down at the table and eat with my two kids.
Anyone with young kids knows the preciousness of a single minute. Time becomes a very valuable commodity, so to feel like you are wasting it? Well, that is not something I can afford to do. Plus, it made everything feel a bit chaotic. Most mamas can attest to the fact you only have a limited amount of time before a mobile baby is yanking at your legs crying if you do not have breakfast or any meal, for that matter, on the table.
"It shouldn't be this hard," I thought, "I do this every day."
So, why was it this hard?
I realized, despite doing it every day, I was doing it differently every day. Same basic parts: food, bibs, drinks, cartoons, silverware, coffee, and napkins, but in what order? And what food would we eat? I was making new decisions daily that were unnecessary. I needed the same result each day, but I was constantly reinventing the wheel on how I did it. It was demanding my full attention when it shouldn't. It should be autopilot by now, and that is my new goal. Create habits that allow me to remove my attention from daily repetitive tasks, and save my attention for more worthwhile things.
So, while this is not something I have mastered, I am sharing with you the process I am using to hopefully create an easier, more peaceful motherhood.
Step 1: Consider your day. What isn't working?
For me, there are too many areas than I care to admit. Once upon a time, when I was a working professional, I constantly analyzed my work. I frequently looked to create good habits and after a time of doing them, I would ask myself how to improve them. Now, I am a stay-at-home-mom and I have not used nearly as much self-leadership in my home life as I did my professional life. I feel recently as if blinders were taken off to see my home life in a different way. I see it now for the potential it has, if I were to take more ownership of it. So now I am asking, what isn't working? What is taking too long? What is feeling chaotic?
Step 2: Write down a tentative plan to make it better.
Know that your first plan is a rough draft. For me, this helps me get started. Starting and doing are worth more than just thinking about doing. If it helps, you could write down a couple ideas and then choose the best among what you have written. It is just important that you stick with only one for a while.
Step 3: Do the plan the same way everyday for a period of time.
The hope is to begin to create a new habit. For me, it is tempting to not stick with it. The reason being is while I am in the midst of doing it, I can see that it needs improving. It is hard to continue when I know what I am doing isn't the best. However, I have found personally that if I try to rush onto improving the habit too quickly it never really takes root. When I continue with something for a period of time, it gives me a foundation off of which to build. So while I know on the first day of attempting a new habit that it will need to be improved, it is best to stay with it.
Step 4: Improve the plan.
Sticking with it for a month may be slightly cringy, however, you finally have permission to change it. Now you have a foundation to build on and a habit that is an anchor in your day. Experience brings more clarity than thought alone, so now you are better suited to make changes than with the limited information you had on day one.
This may seem crazy analytical. Some people might tell you that I actually am crazy analytical, but when we do not intentionally set habits, we choose to continue to use precious mental energy unnecessarily, or worse yet, bad ones will carry us along. How would your life change if you got a little more time back? How would it change if you got a little more ease back? How would you show up differently for your family? So, this is my process, and as I said before, I am still in it. but I am a little curious of what life might be like with a little more sacred time and peace back.
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