How I Became A More Calm And Present Mom

Welcome to Mom On Purpose, where it’s all about helping moms overcome challenges and live their best lives. My hope is by being here, you are more inspired to become the mom you are made to be. I’m Natalie, your host, a wife, boy, mom, dog, mama, Chicagoan, and former lawyer turned professionally, certified coach. If you’re here to grow, I can help. Let’s go.

Hello, hello. How we doing today? Welcome back my friends. I’m so happy to be here with you. I don’t think I have any personal updates. I have been loving this new season of life that I am in with my family. I look around and I just feel so much gratitude and appreciation. And I remember when I did this, when I lived in South Carolina and we would go outside on walks and it was pretty much most often beautiful palm trees sun is shining and I would just think to myself, this is it.

This is beautiful. I love it here. I will never take it for granted. It was just a moment to myself and I find myself doing that here in Chicago. Not about the weather, but about my family, the family that I have wanted for so long and I have it. And there’s this beauty and this growth journey in the having of the thing that you work to create for so long. So, so often we talk about how to create something, how to create the family, how to create the marriage, how to, you know, lose the weight, how to do the thing that you wanna do, how to get the result, but that’s only half of it. Once you get it, you have to learn how to have it. I’m always reminded of lottery winners when I think about this tool because lottery winners often statistically haven’t learned how to have the thing.

And so it’s not uncommon for them to lose the thing. So just notice where you’ve created results in your life. You have to learn how to have the thing. It’s a different journey than learning how to create the thing. So I have just been loving personally my journey of having the thing that I wanted for so long and just soaking it all up, even though that means tantrums and challenges and kids fighting and, you know, just all the things that come with, with raising three little boys. I truly though love it. And I, I daily experience little delights and gratitude because I’m looking for it in my mind. So I just wanna share that with you and, and maybe you’ll be able to do that today too. Just look around and look for something that you wanted, that you already have. Like, I wanted to be married and now I’m married.

Like that’s cool. I wanted to become a mom and now I’m a mom. I wanted to have three little boys and now I have three little boys. Like, that’s so fun. Right? Okay. Anyways, not at all what we’re talking about, just kind of on my heart that I wanna to share with you. What I do wanna talk with you about today is how I became a more calm and present mom. And what I think I wrote down. Let me see here. I think there are 10, yes, 10 things that I thought of that I specifically did that I think could be really helpful for you here. Because when I started this journey, I genuinely thought that I had to choose either I could be ambitious and productive and achieve goals and career success, or I could be sort of the opposite, be calm, be present, relax.

I thought it was an either or situation. And because of that belief, it made it so hard for me to want to slow down. I actually remember feeling panic when one of my coaches back in the day, over five years ago, asked me what it would be like to work less panic. My friends panic. I make more money now than I did then. And I work, oh my gosh, I probably work 15 hours a week right now in part, you know, because I’m prioritizing, being the, the stay at home mom for my kids. But I just, I didn’t even see that that was possible then. So I felt torn at the time between wanting to slow down and wanting to be present and thinking that that wasn’t possible if I still wanted to set and achieve my goals and be ambitious and make money and have a career and all of those things.

But through doing this work, I am telling you I proved myself wrong. I now am very successful, still have the ambition, still am very driven, still set and achieve big goals. And I have the side of me that is calm and present that mostly I use in motherhood. It was so funny as I was sort of, a tangent as I was preparing for this and, you know, I’m, I’m proclaiming that I am a calm and present mom. I looked to my husband and I said, Steve, do you think that I am a calm and present mom? I’m just curious like your take. And he said, what? And I said, with respect to motherhood, like as a mom, do you think that I am calm and present? And he said, verbatim, oh yeah, as a mom, you are definitely calm and present. And we both kind of laughed because he qualified it as, as it pertains to motherhood.

And I love that because first of all, if you know my husband at all, or me, our natural dispositions are that he is the calm, chill, present, easygoing one. That’s just his natural disposition. And my natural disposition is more of the productive, ambitious, high achieving one. So I would bet a lot of money I like, I would almost guarantee that if you polled our friends and family who know us personally, and you asked them, who is the more calm and present parent in our family, 10 out of 10 would say, Steve. And it’s not true. With respect to parenting, with respect to, um, our boys, I am the more calm and present parent. And my friends, I’m so proud of that. We had a little moment where we, we were laughing. I’m proud of it because I worked for it. I earned it. It’s a skill that I now have.

And so I want to just share that with you so you know that it is available to you if you want to become more calm and present. And that doesn’t mean that you’re going to lose your ambition, that you’re going to stop setting goals, that you’re going to not be able to advance in your career. It’s, it’s not that at all. So just know that ahead of time. All right, now let’s dive in to the 10 things that I have done to become more calm and present. Number one is I gained the skills of calm and presence without letting go of my ambition. I stopped seeing it as an either or choice. Instead of thinking that I had to give up my productivity or my drive, I started seeing calm and presence as skills that I could add to my life, to my tool belt.

So I obviously already knew how to work hard, how to plan, how to achieve goals. So I decided to think of it as a skill, as a tool to learn how to be more present, to slow down and actually enjoy the moment that I was in. And also this means that I learned how to like be the mom that I wanna be. And so far as I’m not yelling, I’m not reacting. I am very calm and present with my kids. So it wasn’t so much about becoming this different person who was always calm and present. It was just an expansion of who I already was. So instead of it being either or, it’s, and both, it’s not either I’m ambitious or I’m calm and present. It’s, oh, I’m both ambitious and calm and present. So that’s the first way. The second way I shifted was by practicing doing nothing and letting myself feel uncomfortable. At first, slowing down felt very unnatural.

I worried during that time I worried that if I stopped pushing, striving, working, being productive, that things would fall apart. Would my business suffer? Would my career suffer? Would I make less money? Would I get behind? All ran through my mind. But because I knew this was something that I wanted to change about myself for my future self, I stuck to the plan and allowed myself to do nothing, sit in the discomfort and just see what would happen. Guess what happened? My friends, nothing bad happened. My business kept on trucking along and running. I kept making money, I kept serving my clients. My family was fine and I felt so much better. This alone showed me that rest wasn’t something I needed to earn, it was something that I truly deserved. The third way is similar to the second, but I wanted to separate them out because I think it is different.

It is sitting in 10 minutes of silence every single day. I started doing this and just breathing for 10 minutes a day, sitting with my legs crossed near a window at the same time. I would do it in the morning and in the beginning I would be fidgety. Like it was so hard. I actually started with fewer than 10 minutes. It was like more around five and then built up to 10. And my mind would be racing and I would be like moving my limbs a little bit. It was so hard to just sit. But I kept practicing and the most amazing thing happened. I started to look forward to this time. It was like this special time, this special connection opportunity with myself that was just by myself, for myself. And I think that it helped retrain my body to know that stillness and doing nothing is safe.

Because when you’re so addicted to being busy and going and doing all of the time, slowing down, being still doing nothing feels very unsafe to your nervous system. So over time, practicing 10 minutes of silence helped settle my nervous system helped retrain my body to see that, oh yeah, sitting still and doing nothing is very safe and very helpful. The fourth shift that I made was creating go-to mantras that helped me stay present. And I still use mantras when my mind wanders, particularly when I’m with my kids. One of my favorites is this is the most important work I could be doing. So if I am playing blocks with my kids and I look over and there’s laundry sitting there, or I see a mess from what we were doing earlier across the room, there’s this kneejerk reaction for me to get into productive mode and take care of the house and organize.

I love to organize. I love to pick up again, it’s like using that masculine energy, but instead of applying it to work and career, it’s applying it to the home. So what I do to allow the urge and remind myself that what I’m doing is important and staying present is what I wanna be doing, is I tell myself, this is the most important work I could be doing. I’m telling you it’s a game changer. It just allows me to process that urge and I stay put. You can come up with other mantras for yourself. Like, I don’t need to fill every moment with doing. I can just be, or I am safe in stillness, or this is exactly where I want to be. Or this is the kind of mom that I want to be. Or you know, on and on you come up with whatever resonates with you.

The key here is that you have some go-to mindsets that you can repeat to yourself when your body has this urge to do more. The fifth thing that I did was practice and apply my inner work mindset and feelings, tools to parenting. This resulted in me being able to show up very calmly and still hold boundaries and validate feelings. So what this looks like practically is that I am such a more confident and calm mom during moments of dysregulation. So where my husband might feel overwhelmed during a tantrum, I am leaning in, I’m able to hold boundaries. I’m very calm, I’m very confident, and it’s only because I’ve practiced these tools. So I don’t fall on the side of permissive parenting. I don’t fall on the side of authoritative parenting. I’m not just saying, oh yeah, kids do whatever. I’m also not saying, you know, you can’t ever do that, right?

So the, the two kind of sides of the parenting extremes that we fall into are authoritative where it’s very disconnecting and you’re yelling and you’re trying to control. And then the other side, which is permissive and basically the child is in charge, neither of those are helpful. In the middle is where you can be a really confident leader. And that is a skill that I have dialed in so well. And because of that, I can stay really calm and present even when it’s chaos on the outside. So my kids could be fighting one of them screaming, the dog’s barking, there’s tantrums. I’m, you know, in the middle of the chaos, you know what I’m talking about, right? I’ll be completely calm. And again, I share this with you not to like brag or boast or think that I’m better than anyone. No, not at all.

I’m sharing it because I want you to know it’s not my normal disposition. And I want that to be kind of hope for you to know that these are just skills you have to learn. It’s like learning how to swim. If you’ve never learned how to swim and you get in the water and you’re floundering around and you need someone to jump in and get you telling yourself, oh, I just can’t swim, it’s not made for me. I’m just not someone who can learn how to swim. That’s just not true. You just haven’t learned the skills. So you need a teacher to help you learn the skills and then you go in the water and you practice. That’s all this is my friend. And for me, the two most helpful skills for remaining calm with my kids during those moments of dysregulation and tantrums and all of that have been to hold boundaries and to validate feelings.

So I love the saying, I use it all the time. All feelings are welcome, all actions are not. So if one of my kids is having a complete meltdown about something that’s, you know, completely irrational, wrong color plate or something like that, I tell them it’s okay for you to feel upset. I get it, you really wanted the green plate. I’m so sorry you’re not getting the green plate right now. It’s really hard to feel that upset. I hear you, I see you. I know it’s hard. I’m just validating whatever they’re going through, I’m not trying to rationalize, I’m not trying to change their mind. Now if they pick up the plate, maybe they have the blue plate and one of my sons picks up the plate and they’re ready to throw it, I hold the boundary, I block it, I take the plate and I said, I won’t let you throw that plate.

I know you’re upset though. I know you really wanted that green plate. So I am validating. I am seeing them. I am respecting their feelings. I’m not trying to convince them that they’ll get the green plate next time and there’s only one green plate and their brother has it. And don’t you see this is okay. I’m not trying to talk them out of their feelings. I’m validating where they’re at. I’m validating their feelings and I’m holding the boundary to keep everyone including them, safe. Game changer because it allows me to show up calmly, very present on the inside while there’s chaos going on on the outside. The sixth change I made was setting boundaries with my phone. Our phones are designed to keep us hooked. We talk so much about screen time for kids. Can we just talk about screen time for adults? It’s really easy for me to check something really quickly, but then I’m doing that all of the time.

So I will intentionally place my phone away from me for certain parts of the day. This has been really helpful. I try to remember where I place it because it’s different all the time. Sometimes I lose my phone, but majority of the time it’s somewhere out in the open and I place it somewhere generally that my kids can’t reach it because of course they like the screen as well. And this has made it so much easier for me to fight back that urge to check something just real quick. And over time, this has made a really big difference in my presence with my kids. All they want is mama’s attention. So I wanna make sure that I create some boundaries with my screens to help give them that attention. Makes me a better mom for sure. Alright, the seventh way I shifted was by overcoming perfectionism.

Specifically untying my self worth from my productivity. I used to feel like I was only a good mom if I was constantly doing, constantly checking things off my list, staying on top of everything, keeping the house in order, making sure the laundry was done. But as you can imagine, having three kids who are young, having three kids back to back does not allow for getting everything done. And I still wanna think I’m a great mom. So I stopped measuring my goodness based on how much I get done. I include how present I am, how calm I am, how connected I am in my measurement of whether I’m showing up as the mom I want to be, instead of is all of their laundry folded? I could tell you right now there are piles of laundry in baskets that I have yet to fold hoping to get to them today.

But I am not counting on it and I am not using it as a measurement of my success or of my goodness. It’s just no longer a focus of mine. Something’s gotta give right. I got three little ones. I got a husband. I want to show up and prioritize the relationships the most. So do I care that they have clean clothes? Yep, those clothes and those baskets are clean. Who said you have to fold it? So all I’m saying here is that you may be overemphasizing things that aren’t important, things that don’t matter as much. And I think in a world where there’s an opportunity to always be doing more and adding more to your to-do list, it’s so important that you untie your worth and your goodness from your productivity. I tell myself, being here with my boys is the most important thing I can be doing. Playing with them is more important than getting that laundry done.

Work on that perfectionism, my friends. It is a game changer. Alright, the eighth practice that helped me was journaling about the kind of mom I wanted to be. I started writing about her, what she looked like, how she felt, the thoughts that she would think to create those feelings, how she showed up. And I got really specific. So I kept my boys and my circumstances the same. So they would still fight, they would still act how they’re gonna act. But I was different. I wrote about that. I still do that from time to time. It connects me with how to be calm in challenging circumstances. So every time I wrote about who I wanted to be in those circumstances, I felt myself stepping more into that version of me who could be calm with chaos on the outside. This is my becoming her journaling process that I teach.

If you are in the Mom On Purpose Membership, head on over to the library and click on Journaling course. There are four different types of journaling that I recommend. This is by far my favorite. And you know, most of the members favorite as well. It is you journaling about the mom that you wanna be in the future. And the reason that it’s important for you to write it down is because it allows your brain and body to practice that new way of being. So nothing in your circumstances, nothing in your life has to change for you to change and experience those circumstances in a completely different way. I’m telling you, when my boys fight, when there’s a tantrum, when someone’s just dysregulated and having a meltdown, I do not lose my cool. I genuinely feel grounded on the inside and I lean into that. I’m not trying to avoid it.

I’m not trying to, just get them to stop immediately to feel better. I’m leaning in truly because I feel capable and confident and strong and connected to them on the inside. And it’s from journaling about becoming that mom who I wanted to be. The ninth shift that made a huge difference was switching from a to-do list to a scheduled calendar. So I actually did this prior to becoming a mom. But at every transition in my life, getting married, moving to our new home, moving across the country, having my first son, having my second son, having my third son. With each transition I have adjusted how I calendar.

So kind of without going into the full details of how I do it here, just know that I don’t use a to-do list. I put everything on my calendar in specific time blocks, but I create a lot of white space, which means that I’m saying no to things so that my calendar isn’t full. And I use a flex time list where I put at the top of the day a few reminders of things I wanna get done for that day that I will get done in the gaps. So I’m the primary childcare. We don’t use nanny, we don’t use babysitters, we don’t use daycare, any of that. So there are pockets of time, whether it’s, you know, when I have some time when my husband’s done with work, whether it’s during nap time, whether it’s at night, whether the kids have, you know, fill in the blank activity or when they’ll go to school, all of that.

I’m knowing that I don’t wanna make the decision in the moment for what to use that time for. I have my flex time list every single day most days. But then I also have things on my calendar that I will do at certain times. This is huge because I truly believe that a to-do list puts you into scarcity energy. Your brain can’t conceptualize when you’re gonna do the thing, so it feels more urgent. And that is where you get into, I don’t have enough time, I have so much to do. You can manage your mind around a to-do list. But why? Why waste your precious brain management on managing your mind around a to-do list when you could just use a calendar, clears it all up for you, and save brain management for things that truly you can’t change, right? So challenges with your kids or your husband or your relationships.

Use your brain management on that, working on your goals. Don’t use it on managing your mind around a to-do list. Just schedule it on the calendar. I’m telling you again, if you’re in the Membership, access the Time Management Tools there. Also, if you are thinking about joining the Membership, I really wanna encourage you to do it right now because when you join right now, you will get the February class, which is the Feminine Easygoing Woman. So for all you type a high achievers, I’m going to teach you in this class how to be more easygoing, how to let go, how to embrace that feminine energy and flow that will serve you in motherhood and your marriage, but also relevant to this point that I was just talking about in March. So on March 1st, you get a new class called Better Time Management, and I am revamping and reteaching in a more succinct, easier to understand and more helpful way of applying all of the time management and productivity tools that I teach.

Again, you get that class on March 1st. So every single month in the Membership, I create a new class for you that goes live on the first of the month. So head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to join right now, and you’ll get the February Feminine Easygoing Class right when you join. And on March 1st, the Better Time Management Class comes out and you will get that. Then finally, the 10th thing I did was start validating my own choices. This is so important, my friends, it is so easy to feel pressure from the outside world, whether it’s career expectations, societal standards for motherhood, what you see the moms at school or in your neighborhood doing with their kids or in their homes and using that against yourself. And I like to point out that these are well-meaning comments and a lot of times they’re from family and friends.

We talk about how impressed we are because someone got a promotion or someone’s family is traveling a bunch, or you see the kids succeeding in a certain way in the neighborhood. And that’s not wrong or bad, it’s just that when you praise outcomes so much, it sends the message to us and to whomever we’re praising that you have to do more in order to be good. And it’s just not true. And it gets a little bit toxic because we end up trying to do more in order to be good enough. So what I did was I started validating my own choices. I started telling myself that I am a really great mom because I’m present with my kids. I showed up today Natalie, way to go, way to play imaginative play, which is sometimes hard for me to do. I did that. That was awesome because here’s the thing, no one is going to tell you how awesome you are for showing up for your kids today.

I want you to do that. And if you do have someone telling you that, that’s amazing. But don’t rely on that because just how we’ve been trained and condition and society is to validate and to praise success and achievement. And that’s cool. It is fun to do to to succeed and to work on goals and to advance in your career, but you can get addicted to that validation. And then conversely, when you’re doing other things that are important to you but that aren’t related to success and achievement and outcomes and you’re relying on that validation and you don’t get it, you feel like it’s not worth it. So you had a great day at home with your kids, you played, the house is a mess. You feel so fulfilled and you’re just waiting for someone to tell you, you did a great job. It doesn’t come.

You know what I’m talking about, right? So you have to be the one. Just create a little routine where at night when you’re putting on your pajamas, you tell yourself one great thing you did today. I consistently validate my choices, my thoughts, my feelings, my actions. It really helps me minimize the desire for getting external validation. So I tell myself, I did a great job today. I made a great dinner. I had a lot of fun with my kids. Way to go, Natalie. I showed up even when it was hard. It’s so important because it keeps you in the momentum, it keeps you doing more of what you wanna be doing, which is showing up for your kids. So if you are listening to this and you struggle with feeling like you’re never doing enough or you could be better, but it feels like when you think that there’s something missing or lack, I want you to know that it is possible to let that go.

It’s possible for you to retrain your brain to slow down, to feel safe and stillness, to feel present without any of the mom guilt. I didn’t even touch on that here. That’s its own episode. It’s possible for you to add tools to your tool belt to become a calm and present mom and still maintain the ambitious, the career oriented, the productive side of you. It’s an expansion of who you are. It’s not either or, it’s both. So my hope with this episode is that you gain some insights from my story, from my experience into how you might do this shift for yourself. If this resonated with you, I would love to hear your thoughts, share this episode. Tag me on Instagram over @mom.onpurpose. Send me a dm, send an email to the team@momonpurpose. I would love to go deeper with you.

I would love to hear your story. I would love to hear what resonated with you and just connect with you more. This is work worth doing. It will help you live, I believe, your very best life because your very best life isn’t one where you’re doing only the productive, motivated, driven, career oriented stuff. And it’s also not about only sitting and being, it’s about both. That’s why there’s the yin and the yang and how well you get at being able to balance and shift and navigate b. oth is an art and a practice. And I’m really proud of myself for going on this journey. And I share this with you because I hope that it is inspiring. And if you even just take one thing away from it, then my job here is done. Alright, my beautiful friends, I’ll talk with you next week. Take care.

Thank you for being here and listening. Now, head on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching to learn more about the Mom On Purpose Membership, where we take all of this work to the next level.