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INTENTIONAL PARENTING: HOW TO SPEND TIME ON THE THINGS THAT MATTER TO YOU AND MAKE SPACE FOR YOURSELF

 Modern Mommy Doc


PUBLICATION DATE:

Aug 30, 2020

INTENTIONAL PARENTING: HOW TO SPEND TIME ON THE THINGS THAT MATTER TO YOU AND MAKE SPACE FOR YOURSELF

 Modern Mommy Doc

CATEGORY: MAMA WELLNESS

In the summertime, when the living is easy (no, forget it, that doesn't fit anymore now that COVID-19 is around)...


Seriously, though, no matter what's going on in the world, summertime really is the perfect time to re-evaluate your dreams and goals, but also to re-evaluate how you spend your time day to day and week to week. Summer is slower, there's less to do, there are more opportunities for relaxing, and, especially this summer with hardly any summer camps for the kids or vacation spots open for adult getaways, there is a whole lotta empty TIME.


When things are slower, it's the perfect chance to reset and take a moment to evaluate what life actually looks like for you and what you want it to look like.


Our Priorities Dictate Our Daily Agendas


Last week we talked about dreaming big. Dreaming big allows us to understand our “why”; it helps us understand where we’re going in the next month or year or even ten years. Figuring out our priorities, on the other hand, helps us to get granular about how much time we’ll give to one area or another on a daily basis.


Remember, this is fluid and depends entirely on the stage of motherhood you’re in right now. When you have a newborn, your priority is making sure you’re taken care of, making sure your baby is taken care of, and …yep, that’s about it. And it’s enough, Mama! When your baby or toddler, or even a little older, you’ll be in a completely different stage, …and with that stage will come more sleep and more brain space for bigger dreams and bigger plans. So, give yourself grace, but don't give up on making time to audit on a weekly or monthly basis where you're placing your energy and if those decisions are really serving you or your family.


I tell the story of how I developed my own priorities in The New Baby Blueprint:


My friend Christie is a business executive coach. She spends all day guiding leaders personally and professionally as they make million-dollar decisions. One night, discussing life at a bar, she took a cocktail napkin and wrote out the major categories of life—kids, spouse, work, exercise, friendships, hobbies, homemaking, travel and experiences, and appearance. For clarification, exercise to me meant releasing endorphins, stress reduction, and meditation, whereas appearance included everything that goes into looking put together (including exercise for the purpose of having a good appearance).


She wrote them in random order and then asked me to rank them in order in the left-hand column according to what I, in an ideal world, would spend the most time doing. “Rank them as a private, honest list, not based at all on what other people would think is the right way to rank them,” she said.


I called it my ideal list.


Ideal List


Exercise and stress reduction

KidsTravel and experiences

Hobbies and sports (including writing and reading)

Partner

Friendships

Homemaking (tasks such as laundry and dishes)

Appearance

Work


In the next column, she asked me to rank what I thought I spent my time on.


Here is my reality list.


Reality List:


Work

Homemaking

Kids

Hobbies and sports

Partner

Appearance

Friendships

Exercise and stress reduction

Travel and experiences


Then, she told me to compare them.


Understanding Your Priorities Will Change Your Life


That comparison was scary, Mama. I didn’t like at all how I was spending my time in the real world versus how I wanted to be spending it in my ideal world. So, I changed it. I switched it up. I decided I would spend way more of my time and energy on the top three items on my Ideal List, as opposed to the top three things on my Reality List. Why? Because joy lived at the top of the Ideal List. Stress and resentment found their unhappy home at the top of the Reality List.


Putting Your Priorities Into Practice


To put your priorities into action, you’re going to have to get strategic. Weekly and monthly, take 10 minutes to make your reality and your ideal lists, then compare them against your list of dreams.


Especially in the age of coronavirus, the lines are blurred between have-to and want-to as you mother.


We've got a lot of togetherness with our families right now. Most of us are home more than we've ever been and, although it was great and all at first to spend eighty hours a week picking up laundry and hanging with our kids, it's now getting old. You need space, Mama, and it's not selfish AT ALL to take it. Give yourself the gift of 10 minutes of meditation or journaling in the morning before everyone else needs you. Take an extra 5 minutes in the car when you come back from the grocery store to roll back the seat and listen to your favorite jam and to consider how you want tomorrow to look. Take time to start thinking about how you feel and what you need before you start thinking about what other people need. If you do, you'll be able to show up as a mom and as a human more freely and fully.


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Episode Takeaways: This is not an episode about “how to grow a multimillion dollar business” or how to double your following overnight. I really shy away from talking about business because it’s disheartening to see that most of the people making online are people who are trying to teach you how to make money online. This is an episode that comes from many conversations I’ve had recently with people who are wanting to start a side hustle or even a full blown business, but are curious how to do that with the rest of life that’s going on around them. I’ve recently made a hugely drastic shift in my career and have moved from private practice into a company called Blueberry Pediatrics . It is a shift that still allows me to practice medicine as well as still running Modern Mommy Doc full time. The thinking behind this shift really is born out of these 8 tips I have about running a business while you’re working full time or maybe still taking care of your family. 1) Know your why. We’ve heard it a thousand times, but if we don’t know the driving force behind why we want to do a certain thing, it’s infinitely easier to stop doing it when things get hard. Ask yourself why you’re so committed to this one particular area. In my business, my why is to help, support, and encourage women (specifically working moms) so they don’t feel alone in their journey. So when I’m pulled away from my family for a time period or I’m exhausted from traveling, I remember the greater mission behind what I do. 2) Expect that you’re going to fail. I just pulled the plug on a project we had been working on at Modern Mommy Doc for two years: the Modern Mamas Club app. I thought it was going to be so valuable for moms, when in reality it was just duplicating what we already had. I learned so much through that process and at the beginning, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Failure is a natural part of growth. 3) Prepare to invest in your business. With your time, with your money, with your emotions. People ask me how I grew and I told them it took a lot of time and a lot of my own money. There were times that that was discouraging, but because all of this was tied to my why, I was able to push forward. 4) Figure out what you can outsource and what has to be done by you. At the beginning you might not have any money to outsource with. But set yourself up for success and know what you’ll hand off when you get to that point. Don’t waste time trying to do it all. 5) Network based on what you love & pay for good PR. When you want to grow your business, network with the people that you genuinely connect with, not just because you might get a sale. Figure out who it would be mutually beneficial for you to get to know. And when it comes to PR, you’ve gotta pay to play the game. PR isn’t for instant leads, but is also a long game like networking. 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In fact, there are so many parallels between the way I run my business and the things I taught in my newest book, Doing It All: trying to build efficiency into how I do my tasks, batching my work, not spending extra time on stuff that doesn’t matter at all, swapping out for what others can do for me, pairing things that aren’t enjoyable with things that are, not letting things contaminate my time, and making sure my desk, home, and calendar are decluttered. More Blogs on this Topic: T he forgotten boundary: setting limits with yourself Thanks for the cookies in the breakroom, I’m still tired Wake up, working mama. Are you wasting your life? More Podcast Episodes on this Topic: T ranslating “mom skills” into “boss skills” How to be an ambitious, out of the box, career maker and an engaged mom How to claim your confidence as a working mom
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