My Favorite Mindsets, Tools, And Habits As A High Achieving 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, my beautiful friends. Welcome to the podcast. I feel a little bit on fire today. I’m so motivated and excited and I think you are going to hear that come out through today’s episode, which is all about my favorite mindsets, tools, and habits as a high achieving mom. Before we dive into all of that, goodness, if you could please do me a favor and write a review. Even if you’ve written a review before, another review would mean so much to me.

It helps the podcast grow and reach so many more women who I know would benefit from these tools. Also, if there is a topic that you would like to hear from me, as always, you can send me a DM or call the podcast hotline at eight three three three, ask nat 8 3 3 3 2 7 5 6 2 8. You can also drop it in your review. After you review the podcast, you can just mention something that you would love to hear from me. I am open to all of the ways that you want to reach out to me. I love creating content that really resonates with you. So that’s been really fun for me, to grow the show in that way. And that’s really how I came up with today’s podcast. I am constantly getting questions about my life and how I apply these tools to my everyday life. And so I thought it would be fun to go through a little bit more of my story, how I apply these tools. I think I have eight of them to share with you and also how you can best get started with them if you want to. Okay, so with that, let’s dive in to tool number one, which is what I’m calling my motherhood mindset. What I mean by this is to treat motherhood like it’s a high performance job. Like you are the leader of your family. So in my case, I’m the leader of my family. I treat motherhood like the high performance job that it is. I’m leading with my husband and that means I set the tone. I influence the culture of my family from the highest level. I care about everyone in the family, but it’s also family focused and neither parent nor child focused. So this tool or mindset, if you want to call it really helped me understand my role as a mom. It helped me understand how motherhood can include so many hats.

There’s the fun hat, the organized hat, the nurturing hat, the nurse hat, the boundary holder hat. There are so many hats that I wear as mom and that you wear as mom. And I love being a mom so much and I never, you know, expect it to just be easy or kind of like one way. I expect it to be hard. But when I think about myself as a leader, when I think about myself as treating motherhood like a high performance job, it immediately shifts the way that I feel. Instead of feeling like I’m at the effect of motherhood or like I’m doing something wrong or bad. If it’s a rough day, I remind myself leaders do hard things. Oh, this is just part of it. And you know, when I think about the leaders who I admire and like, they’re not complaining, they’re not looking on social media for the worst about their jobs.

They’re positive and they’re focused on what they can control and they’re, you know, constantly trying to improve, not from a place of lack, but from a place of, of genuinely wanting to improve because that sounds fun. And so I like taking this on as my mindset in motherhood because as a former attorney, CFP, someone who really thrived in her career and still thrive as a coach and online business owner, I get what it means to be a leader. I love studying leadership and applying that to motherhood makes so much sense to me. So in the simplest way, when I think about getting up and going to a high performance job, I would shower, I would take care of myself, I would put on, you know, the appropriate clothes for that job, put on my makeup, show up enthusiastically, now apply to motherhood. Maybe the outfit looks different, but I wouldn’t be rolling out of bed haphazardly dreading the day, right?

So I think about being a leader as a mom. Yes, I’m in somewhat of comfortable clothing, but I’m still getting dressed. I’m still doing my hair, I’m still showing up intentionally, physically, mentally, and emotionally. No, not perfect. Just like if I was going into the office, there would be days that would be harder or maybe a little bit more draining, but most of the time I would put my quote unquote best foot forward. And I think ’cause we don’t have anyone who is like our boss in motherhood and because of the “relatable mom culture “, I think we tend to not do this. We tend to normalize just rolling out of bed, and getting into the day without any intentionality at all. And it’s not that you are better or worse if you do it either way, it’s just that it’s actually so much more fulfilling, so much more rewarding, just such a better experience of the day when you show up as a leader who you want to be.

When I show up with a plan for the day, I’ve meal planned, I have my clothes set out, I take a shower even if I’m tired, even if I was up with a baby or a child in the middle of the night, I still approach the day so much more effectively. I’m happier, I’m more inspired, I’m more motivated, I have a better day. So for this tool, the questions that I want to leave you with are what kind of leader as a mom are you? What kind of culture do you have in your family? How do you show up every day for your family, physically, mentally, and emotionally? Okay, now let’s move on to number two. This is mind management, questioning my thoughts, noticing cognitive distortions, like taking things too personally catastrophizing inside the Mom On Purpose Membership, we have a whole class on cognitive distortions that is a member favorite and I use it all of the time.

This tool is really about choosing what to think on purpose. So I did not know before learning these tools, studying them and getting certified in them, I did not know that I could think anything. I didn’t know that my thoughts were optional. I didn’t know that thoughts create feelings. I thought that the world created my feelings. I thought that other people created my feelings. I thought that my circumstances created my feelings. I thought that I had to think based on what I’ve always thought based on that first thought that popped into my head when I learned no, it’s not true. I could think anything and that I got a choice that when my default brain pops in some unhelpful thought, some negative thought, I don’t have to believe it, I can question that thought and choose a new thought. Oh my goodness, my friends. Everything for me changed.

I felt a wave of anger and resistance lift. I felt a wave of hope and inspiration fuel me. I knew that I had so much more power over my life than I had ever known before. And that was just when I first learned mind management tools, questioning my mindset, noticing those cognitive distortions, deciding what to think on purpose. And to this day and forever, as long as I have like a healthy mind and the capacity to do this work, I will forever do it. I cannot imagine living life, particularly through motherhood without managing my mind. The comparison trap, the doubts, the mom guilt, the anger, the frustration, the overwhelm. I think just knowing how I am would overcome me without knowing how to properly manage my mind. The self pity I forgot self pity, mind management is just that I manage my mind. It’s not that I get rid of all of those things, it’s just that I so know how to manage them so that they’re not in the driver’s seat so that I can feel more confident, excited, energized, happy in my everyday life.

And it’s not just about the feelings because the feelings are great. I’m all for feeling good, but my feelings drive my actions. So if I am loathing in self pity because I didn’t get enough sleep before, I’m very unlikely to engage and connect with my kids and take them out on an adventure for the day. But if I manage my mind, even if I’m tired, I still do that. Not because I think I have to, but because I genuinely want to. So the actions that I take on a daily basis are completely different because I’m questioning my thoughts. I know that the sentences in my mind, the thoughts that I’m thinking, the mindset that I have on default is just one mindset. If I like it, if it’s serving me, awesome. If it’s not, I can create an entirely new mindset and then my actions are so much better. So for you my friend, what are you thinking? What are you wiring your brain for? What are you focused on? Take the simple question that we often ask each other, like, how are you doing? How would you answer that question? If someone says to you, how are you? What’s your answer? Do you say, oh, I’m busy. Oh, I’m fine. And then move on. What about amazing? I am freaking amazing because your life is amazing. Are you looking for that? Are you focused on that? It is a daily practice to override your primitive brain.

And I’m telling you, it is so worth it because you have so much in your life right now that you could focus on to be so grateful for. This is not about toxic positivity and ignoring the challenges. It is about mind management. It is about deciding to rewire your brain for positivity, for happiness, for the desires, the life that you genuinely want. I cannot imagine living my life without knowing how to manage my mind. My life is a complete 180 and not just the results that I have now, but feeling so capable and empowered to create the life that I want in the future. And to be excited about that my friend, you have got to come inside the Mom On Purpose Membership and see how you can use the brain management tools to change your life. I mean, for a very small fee, less than taking your family out to dinner, you can do this and just test it out.

So if you go on over to momonpurpose.com/coaching, you can sign up there. You will immediately get access to the Cognitive Distortions class as well as the Inner Work Framework class. And you get access to me as your coach to answer all of your questions. You can submit a written question anytime day or night. And then we have a weekly group coaching call. You can come live or you can get the replay. It is so easy and accessible. I just, I want you to see the power of mind management in your life. I’m so passionate about it because it’s one that when I learned it was life changing, but it continues to be life changing. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have challenges. It doesn’t mean I don’t have bad days. It just means that I’m able to respond more purposefully instead of react to whatever crazy, nonsense, negativity and drama that my default brain comes up with.

Okay, number three, planning. Not escaping my life with the primitive brain’s desire for immediate gratification in the moment. Instead, I use my prefrontal cortex to plan purposefully. So I create the life I genuinely want in the long term. It’s not just that I plan more things to do, it’s that I plan purposefully. There is a huge difference. So oftentimes when I teach planning, people think that sounds too rigid, that sounds, too inflexible. What about the spontaneity? And it’s always the case that the people who are saying this don’t have the results that they want in their life. Because in the moment it’s hard to tell what’s true spontaneity from your primitive brain wanting to escape, wanting a little dopamine hit. But when you use planning tools the way I teach, it’s not that you over plan and do, do do from sunup to sun down, but you also don’t under plan.

If you think of a spectrum, we don’t want to go to either side of the spectrum. In the middle is where you plan thoughtfully so that you create your life deliberately. So I plan downtime, I plan white space, I plan family time, I plan self-care. It’s really more about being intentional with the time that you have than it is about doing more. You do actually get more done when you use this planning method that I teach, but personally I’m always trying to do less. I want to do less and get more done. And my brain, even saying that is like, wait, those are at opposition with each other. But that’s not true. It just requires a higher level of thinking. It requires getting out of that busy, busy, busy go, go, go, never stopping, never enjoying energy. It requires some mindset work, right? You gotta stop saying my life is overwhelming, right?

But if you do that and you use the planning methods that I teach, I promise you everything gets simpler and you create more of the results that you want. Results, meaning outcomes. Maybe you’re writing a book, like you’ll get that book done. If you use this planning method, you’ll also though have the time and the space to be with your family. And that’s actually where I suggest starting because if you are like me, my friend, and you are that high achiever on default, you don’t have a problem being in that go, go, go busy energy. So for this tool, what I suggest doing is to start with planning your self-care plan, time alone, plan time to journal, plan white space, plan one-to-one time where you’re off your phone with your kids, plan, the important stuff. And you get to decide what the important stuff is.

But if I asked you what’s more important, 10 minutes of sitting down uninterrupted with one of your kids with your phone and the TVs and the screens away or 10 minutes folding laundry. I’m pretty sure you would say the former sitting down with your child screens away. And yet, how often do we just look around the house and see there’s piles of laundry, so we should just do it. It’s a very reactive way to live. And so planning gets you out of that reactivity so that you can be more deliberate with how you’re spending your time. It’s really about using your time purposefully than it is about filling your time with all of the things. So for the high achievers listening out there who are already doing too much, start with that. Start with planning your self-care, your downtime, your one-to-one time with your kids planning white space, just for you to, to have space and feel what that’s like.

It is a total game changer. Okay, number four, this is kind of a two for one. I put them together because they’re similar. They’re really inner work tools. Self-confidence and self-love. So self-confidence is self-trust. It’s not confidence in doing the thing, it’s confidence I’ll have my own back no matter what. So confidence in a thing is different than self-confidence. I can be really confident that I make an amazing Greek salad, for example. That’s confidence in a thing. Self-confidence is my trust in myself to have my back feel my feelings and not beat myself up regardless of the outcome of the thing that I’m doing. Okay, so big distinction there. And I think that most of us understand what general confidence is. If we want to, become a better skier and have more confidence skiing, we’re going to go take skiing lessons. That’s not self-confidence. Self-confidence is inward.

It’s, inner directed. It’s how you talk to yourself. If you miss the mark, if you make the mistake, if you fail, if you don’t get the promotion, that’s self-confidence. Are you in the habit of beating yourself up? That’s what I’m talking about here because I was notorious for this. I was so hard and harsh and critical on myself. And this is still one of the tools that I proactively use like a lot, particularly in motherhood. Of course, I want to be a good mom, of course, I think I am a good mom. And also reminding myself that my actions are not reflective of whether I’m good or bad, right? And separating out identity from actions is really helpful. And self-confidence can help with that. Same with self-love. Self-love is about how do I treat myself? How do I talk to myself? Do I like being with myself?

It’s choosing me even when someone else doesn’t. It’s validating myself at the end of the day saying, you know what? I did a really great job. I started validating myself to my family, like to my kids and to my spouse. And it’s kinda awesome. They, they’ll all agree, but it’s just so much more fulfilling, rewarding and exciting for me to say it. I’m like, I made four dinners in a row that were new and were kind of awesome this week. Like I just did this. And they were like, yeah, it was great, you know, kind of thing. And I was just, I was fueled with pride. That’s what I mean by validating myself. I’m not looking for anyone else to validate me. I’m genuinely proud of the leader that I’m being. That is self-love. So for you, my friend, do you like yourself? Do you tell yourself you’re doing a really great job?

Do you have your own back when you get it wrong? When you make mistakes, do you rely on others for your confidence and validation? Pay attention to this. It is so important. Inside the membership, we have a course called Become Your Own Best Friend. And you learn how to unwind all of this and it really will help you love yourself more, validate yourself and have that inner guided self-confidence that has been so life-changing for me. Number five, parenting Tools. You can go back and listen to the episodes that I have on parenting. I’m not going to dive into each of the parenting tools here, but I did want to mention a few that are at the top of the list for me that have truly been life changing for me. And that is holding boundaries, validating feelings, being fueled by curiosity and respecting my kids. I grew up with typical authoritarian parenting styles and I wanted to be different with my kids.

So entered the journey of self-development on parenting. And I am obsessed with child development, parenting and learning all of the things not from lack, not from a place of I think I’m going to do it wrong or mess them up, but genuinely because as the leader of my family, that’s who I want to be. So the fact that I can stay completely calm, hold boundaries and validate my kids’ feelings to me I think is kind of a miracle because I knew nothing about this before and now I’m really an expert at it and I’m so proud of that transformation. Respect is another huge one for me. I’m not ever holding myself out as a mom who knows it all, or a mom who knows better. But instead I hold myself out as a human mom who is listening, leading, and respecting my kids. Sometimes respect means no.

So respect doesn’t always mean yes, but I’m always going to listen and respect my kids’ experiences. It’s just a completely different mindset, a completely different way of being when I am parenting. And it’s one that I learned. So it’s a skill and I want you to know that if you are yelling, if you are rushing, if you don’t feel like you’re respecting your kids in the way that you want to be, if there’s a lot of disconnection and frustration in your parenting, in your relationship with your kids, 1000%, you can change that. And it doesn’t take them, it just takes you learning these tools. I have done it myself and I see it time and time again. Now, a lot of the examples that I give, you know, on the podcast and on social media over at mom.onpurpose are with respect to my little ones.

But I just want to be clear that this applies to kids of all ages. The membership includes hundreds of moms who have kids all the way from infants to, you know, out of the house, empty nester moms, a lot of moms with kids in the middle school, aged kids, teenagers, the whole spectrum. When you learn the tools that I teach, you’re applying them to yourself. You’re learning how to be a leader and hold a boundary. You’re learning how to validate feelings. You’re learning how to lead with curiosity and respect and still sometimes say no. You’re learning how to let your kids feel how they want to feel without thinking that you know what’s “best for them”, but still having guidelines and rules in your home. It is just a skillset. I don’t even think it’s a hard one, I just think it’s one that for so many of us, particularly if you’re like me, where you just didn’t grow up with that example, you just gotta learn it.

It’s kind of like, you know, learning how to swim if you didn’t learn how to swim. It makes sense that when you get in the water, you’re sort of like flailing around. But if you just learn some breast stroke and backstroke and kinda how to tread water after you practice it for a few months isn’t not so bad. That’s why I want you to think about these tools, particularly with respect to parenting. I think that as moms, particularly the high achieving moms, we want to do such a good job. So we intertwine our worth with how good of a job we’re doing. When you separate it out, it gets so much easier. It’s like, oh, this is just a skill that I’m going to get good at. So start with respect, I think. I think that’s a great place to start. Respect your kids from infancy to adulthood.

All humans are worthy of respect. You don’t have to agree with them, you don’t have to say yes, but you can be respectful in whatever your response is. You can be respectful and disagree, you can be respectful and say no. And then over time continue to learn these skills and I promise you, you will forever feel connected to your kids regardless of what’s going on for them. Number six, marriage tools similar to kids, but I wanted to, pull out what has been so life changing for me personally. Respect, curiosity, acceptance, teamwork, and not taking things personally. So my parents fought a lot. My parents were yellers, they divorced when I was 12. They never really respected each other. Like that’s my sort of view of them. There were lots of high highs and lots of low lows. It was definitely sort of that like push pull relationship. And I didn’t have an example of like a calm, easygoing, stable household. I would say. I think my parents did the best that they could. I think I had a fine and even great childhood, but with respect to just looking at their marriage and the marriage that I knew I wanted to create, it is night and day. So one of my greatest transformations that I will forever be so proud of is changing how I dated men and changing kind of my destiny with respect to marriage. It was not my path at first. I dated men who were partiers and I always thought I’d be with someone who struggled with alcohol. And that continued to be reflected in my relationships. Not all of my relationships, but definitely some of them. And then in the ones that alcohol wasn’t a part of it or they weren’t partying, there was still like that push pull, high, high, low, low type of relationship.

I would call it just a more immature relationship, very based on chemistry alone and nothing else. ’cause that’s what I thought. And we see this modeled in movies and in the media a ton. And I did not know how to create anything else. I thought that was quote unquote love. And truly, when I say I am a different person now and have a completely different relationship, IE marriage to an amazing man, Steve, it is something I am so proud of. And I just, I can’t stress this enough that if you want to change your marriage or your dating or the way that you approach anything with respect to romance in your life, these tools, are the way I, I truly believe that. So ask yourself where you are now and where you want to be because you can change your marriage. You just have to focus on you.

I work with clients who have been married for 30 plus years or three years, and it doesn’t really matter the length of time. It just matters whether and to what extent you want to change inside the Mom On Purpose Membership. There’s a marriage toolkit that you get right when you join, plus obviously all of the coaching, the weekly group coaching and the written coaching that’s available 24 7. And those tools will help you increase connection in your marriage, let go of resentment and truly foster the relationship that you want to have. I’m thinking of one client who’s been married for over 30 years now, and she just told me how much better her marriage is from applying the tools that she learned inside the Membership and coaching with me specifically. She’s not turning disagreements into fights like she used to. She’s having more compassion and curiosity with her husband, and so there’s not as much tension.

She said that instead of just reacting off the cuff and making things worse, she’s figured out how to create a pause, think about it and respond so much more respectfully. So her husband hasn’t done any of this work, and yet her marriage is completely different. And it’s through these little moments, applying these tools recurring so that they turn into habits and they really do change sort of the dance that you’re in, in your marriage. Alright, number seven, calm. Can we just talk about that? Are you someone like me who that high achiever in her just always struggled to be calm? I never used to be able to just relax and be calm and just chill. I thought it was just “how I was” to be wired that way. Always doing, always working, always on. I knew though that that’s not the kind of mom nor the kind of wife that I wanted to be.

So I began to work on myself in this way and I really did put a lot of work into learning how to calm down and be still. I know it seems counterintuitive because you’re actually doing nothing, but I love telling my clients that, you know, you want to give a type A or a goal, tell her to take a nap in the middle of a Monday. And that’s really what we’re talking about here. It’s slowing down so that you can just be and do less. And it’s not about ever setting goals or ever turning the volume up, on doing more. It’s about seeing that you have a choice and thinking about it like a dial. Just so you know no one, and I mean no one is meant to be on in that high energy all the time. Look at how we sleep. We’re still and we’re resting.

You should have moments like that, or dare I say, periods like that during the day where you’re also like that your body should default to a state of rest. That is what the nervous system needs. We’re already sort of getting long on time here, so I don’t want to go into all of the science behind the nervous system, but I promise you that the default state is rest. And it’s hard to see that in our modern lives because the way that, you know, progress has afforded us all of the kind of efficiencies and luxuries in modern day life. We get the benefits of that, but also we struggle to be at a state of rest. So we’re not going out hunting and gathering and coming back and resting or running from the lion and coming back to safety and calming down. We are going from little fire to little fire to little fire throughout the day.

We’re going from work to kids to cooking, to laundry, to yoga, to whatever it is. Go, go, go, go, go. Hit the pillow, do it again. And it’s not so much about what you’re doing as it is about how you feel while you’re doing it. And that’s why in the planning tool, I talked about scheduling in some of that downtime. And I actually think that if you want to get to more calm and this will impact how calm you are in your marriage, it will impact how calm you are in your parenting. It will impact how calm you are in any circumstance. I actually suggest starting with just sitting in a few minutes of silence every day. I call it my 10 minutes of silence tool. If 10 minutes is too much, start with three minutes. Set your timer on your phone, turn your phone over, sit down, don’t do it standing, don’t do it lying down.

Just sit. Maybe cross lugg it if you want. I like to do it near a window. Do this every single day for the same amount of time in the same place to the extent that you can and allow your body to start to familiarize itself with doing nothing and being calm. It is one of my favorite little habits to do and to suggest because it’s so, simple and effective. And yet, if you are the high achiever and that doer energy who struggles to stay calm, there will be a lot of discomfort that comes up when you do this. And if that’s the case my friend, you are doing it right. All right, the last tool that I am obsessed with that helps me as a high achieving mom is being future focused, not being limited by my past, dreaming of an intentional, thoughtful future and becoming that next version of myself.

I used to look at where I was in the moment and think that determined my future. I remember being in law school debt and thinking that I was behind and that meant that I was going to be in debt forever. I used to date men who partied, as I said, and they weren’t great husband material in my opinion. And so I thought that because that’s who I was attracted to because that’s who I had “chemistry with”. I couldn’t have the safe, calm, secure family that I desperately wanted, but none of that was true thankfully. And I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. And it is truly wild and just so rewarding and fulfilling to be living on the other side of this. I paid off my debt relatively quickly, right under 10 years. And then I changed the way that I approach dating in men among other transformations. Those are just the ones that stood out to me when I used to think about how my past and current circumstances limited me. And it was only through being future focused that I was able to change. You all know my husband is amazing. He chose me and barely drinks at all and is cool and I chose him. And we have the most incredible family that we are building and growing. And is it hard? Yes. That’s why I I always think about how awesome our marriage is and our family is and how, yet it’s still hard. I cannot imagine doing this family life with a partner who, who wasn’t so great. Like, it would just add hard to an exponential level. And I’m so grateful that I did that work. I’m so grateful that on top of just the normal day-to-day challenges of raising a family that I’m not, um, thinking about is my husband going to go out and get drunk tonight? Like I gave that gift to myself by completely changing and it just took me, turns out there are a lot of cool guys out there who don’t drink.

Turns out I was able to pay off my debt really quickly and make a lot more money and be a stay at home mom. Like there are so many possibilities for your life if you let go of thinking in the way you’ve been taught or thinking in the way that you’ve thought in the past. If you change your mindset to be future focused and allow yourself to be defined by a future that you genuinely want instead of a past that limits you, the limit is the sky. My friends, as Jay-Z says. So start looking to your future and creating it intentionally based on what you genuinely want. Be brave. Be bold, my 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.