Transitions, Routines, And Back To School

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. Today we are talking about transitions, routines, and back to school. Before we dive in, just a reminder, if you have a question for me, I would love to answer it. Just call the podcast hotline at 833-AskNat that’s 833-327-5628get some free help and tools and coaching to help you navigate whatever challenge or goal that you are currently working on. That said, you can also email me.

So today you’re going to hear from someone who emailed in. This is available to you if you prefer. All you have to do is email the [email protected] with your submission. Give as much detail as you’re comfortable with and the question, and I will feature it here on the podcast if it’s a good fit for I think a broader audience. And that is where today’s question came in, which is:

Hi Natalie. I’m struggling with back to school for my three kids who are all under 12 years old. I’m sad summer is ending and at the same time excited there’s going to be a routine in place, but I’m also feeling anxious about it. I’m not sure what the right routine is for our family in this new school year. It feels very overwhelming with so much going on for each of my kids, as well as managing my own life, family, marriage, home and on and on. I also want my kids to be successful and enjoy back to school too. I’m wondering if you have any strategies or tips to help with this time of year. Thanks so much for all that you do.

Alright, my friends, yes, I have lots of strategies and tips and this is a topic that I coach on a ton, specifically transitions. It doesn’t really matter if it’s transitions back to school or something else. We will talk about it specifically through that lens here. But I just want you to know that any transition you’re going to find, a lot of these tools will apply for because the brain doesn’t like transitions because it’s a shift from where you are now to something different and your brain likes where you are. Now, it’s in the habit of it. I like to remind myself of what Abraham Hicks says, which is the path of least resistance is the path you’re already on.

So whatever routine you’re currently in, that’s the easiest one to maintain. It takes a lot more prefrontal cortex brainpower to shift into doing something new. It requires more energy, it requires more thought, even if it’s something that you want. It still comes with resistance. So one of my favorite ways of thinking about this is to expect resistance in the transition, to plan for all transitions, to have some challenges. Now, this doesn’t mean going into a negative mindset or doom and gloom, it just means that I like to think about it as this is a transition and it’s very likely that because it’s something new and different, my brain is going to, you know, have a hard time with it, at least in part, and that’s okay. So I like to allow myself for there to be an adjustment period. It’s just like bringing home a new baby where everyone is learning their new roles and getting used to the new way of being a family.

It’s the exact same with going back to school or any other transition. There’s a period of learning new routines and settling in, and this just put simply is hard for the brain, but hard doesn’t mean bad. You want to go back to school, you want your kids to go back to school, you want to embrace the new routines and fall. And just because it’s hard doesn’t mean something’s gone wrong. So I think that’s really important to remember. Hard doesn’t mean bad, it just means hard and maybe it’s harder than you thought. I love that mindset for myself, oh, I knew this was going to be hard, but it’s actually harder than I thought. That is helpful because I don’t make hard than mean bad. It’s not like, oh no, this is harder than I thought, and that’s bad. It’s, oh, like oh, almost a little bit of surprise.

Oh, this is harder than I thought. And that’s okay. I want to also talk about the anxiety that you mentioned. I think that when it comes to anxiety about going back to school, transitioning into new routines and the fall, remind yourself that anxiety is a feeling that is okay to feel for you, for your kids, for anyone, anything new in the future. Your brain has the opportunity to struggle with, to fear and to create anxiety over, and this is just normal. It’s the survival part of the brain trying to keep you alive, which was really helpful for evolutionary purposes. Not as helpful today when we’re talking about going back to school because your brain doesn’t know that you’re not going to die. So your job is to just manage the anxiety, and what I mean by manage it is to allow it to process it.

Inside the membership, we have an entire course on how to manage feelings, including anxiety. So you’re going to befriend the anxiety, you’re going to welcome it, you’re going to name it that way, you create some separation. It’s not that you are anxious or your child is anxious, it’s that you feel the feeling of anxiety. And so you create some space between who you are and how you feel. And that’s incredibly empowering, particularly with respect to feelings like anxiety or worry. One thing that I really like to focus on with respect to transitions that I am anticipating might be challenging like back to school, is to remind myself of my role as mom. I like to think of myself as the chief culture officer, the CCO in my home. And I like to treat being a mom, like a high performance job. I set the tone and the attitude like a leader in a company.

I like to think of myself as organized and I shower and get dressed every day. I create a plan. I’m attentive, I am respectful, I am energetic, I’m solution focused, and I’m my family’s number one cheerleader. That’s sort of my mindset around this role, which is my job right now. And this means taking care of my emotions. It means practicing self-care. It means creating a plan and strategy for back to school. And I say this not because I want you to think that you have to do it this way, but inside the membership this month I created a brand new class called Intentional Parenting. And I really love using the analogy of working in a corporate environment or some other high performance role and being a mom. And when you think about it in that way, it completely shifts your attitude because the truth is, I don’t want to feel like an overwhelmed, frustrated mom who’s yelling at her kids, who’s always struggling.

Now, might there be days where I’m in my leadership role where I feel frustrated or I am struggling a little bit more? Absolutely. But it’s the difference between this is my identity and I’m always like this versus okay, from time to time I feel a little bit of frustration. So if you’re not in the membership, I definitely recommend getting in this month so you can get that class because I go into it very in depth and I give you the tools and the skills and the practices that you can get started with to completely change your identity in this role. So I like to not only do this part, but also remind myself to evaluate myself based on my own standards, not based on my kids’ success or lack thereof. So I think on default what we do is we base whether we are being a good mom based on how well our kids are doing in school.

So if you’re thinking, if my kid doesn’t transition well back to school, then I must be doing wrong. That is really disempowering because it ties your success to your kids’ actions. It’s unfair to you and it’s really unfair to your kids. So separating that out, knowing that they may struggle and if they do, you can support them, but not tying your worth and your value and your goodness to their outcomes is really important for both of you so that your kids don’t feel that pressure from you in an unhealthy, unhelpful way. And also so that you can validate yourself. And that’s important just for you as a human being, but also so that you can show up for your kids in a supportive way and help them navigate any challenge that they’re having. The difference though, is in your approach because if you tie their performance and their success to your goodness, so if you need your kids to do well, transitioning back to school and make friends and, you know, do well on their activities and get good grades, in order for you to think that you’re doing a good job as a mom, you will put an unnecessary amount of pressure on them that they will feel that teaches them that your love, for lack of a better word, is conditional on their performance.

And of course, this is not what you intend, but that is the way it will be perceived if they only get validation when they’re doing really well. And if you’re like freaking out when they’re struggling, they’re going to pick up on, oh, you know, this is way harder for my mom and,, I don’t feel the same type of love when I’m going through a challenge. And so that’s where that people pleasing comes into play and it’s just inauthentic and it kind of decreases connection. So you can benefit greatly, again, I teach this in the class this month with respect to creating your own standards for measuring your own success, just like it was a high performance job based on things you can control. And then when your kids are struggling or having a challenge with grades or with activities or with friends or transitioning, then you can show up for them very specifically, very much in a loving, confident, helpful way, but without the need for them to change in order for you to feel better.

You can feel confident and loving and supportive and capable and help them navigate their challenge. It’s not that you’re happy they’re having a challenge, but you are not tying your goodness to them overcoming this challenge. It’s really important. So kinda the bottom line for this mindset is that you measure your own effectiveness, your own leadership as a mom based on standards that are within your control. And I give you a ton of those standards. I think I have 10, this month in the class, but of course you can create your own. I give you the 10 that I use and that I like.

The next part of this is taking that mindset of, okay, I am a leader in my home and my job as part of being the leader is to be prepared. And that transitions into planning. So create a plan for the new routine that you want. This does take work upfront. It can take hours and hours of looking at your g cal of, you know, putting things that you anticipate based on the school calendar that they gave you. Putting all of those on your calendar, putting all of the activities on your calendar. It takes attention and time and it’s tedious. And I do this all of the time in my own life. And you know, it’s always surprising to me how much time it takes. Like I could spend two to three hours when I’m going through a transition to, prepare my calendar to plan effectively. So for example, when I was planning my most recent maternity leave, it took hours, I mean at least three, maybe four hours of planning out every single thing that I was going to do to create my own maternity leave and when I was going to do it and putting things in different time slots.

And you know, at the end of that process I had this amazing plan, but at the same time it kind of felt like, oh my gosh, that was like exhausting. That was, like a lot of work. But you know what, I always think to myself, I’m so glad I did that. It is going to make the routine of the next few months so much easier and more effective and more helpful in our lives and my life personally, professionally, and as a family. And so you can do that same thing for your kids’ activities, for their school events, for your appointments, for anything that you know you can plan, get organized ahead of time, put the time to get organized and to plan on your calendar. And that is something that I cannot stress enough because it will pay huge dividends. And this doesn’t mean that you have to have the perfect right new routine at first.

And I think this gets to what you said in your submission, which was, you know, you’re not really sure what the right routine is. So what I like to do is just give my best guess and test and find out. I’m constantly telling my clients, okay, we’re just going to test and find out. So it’s not like you need to have this schedule and routine down perfectly the right way as if there is a right way. It’s okay based on the circumstances, based on my kids’ activities, based on my life and my spouses and our families and all of the things that are happening. This is my best guess at a good routine for us and a good calendar for us and a good plan for us for this, you know, half of the year for this semester. And then you can reevaluate. So after two weeks, after a month, you might say, okay, you know, we’ve done a month of this way, and what I’m noticing is that actually the afterschool routine needs to be adjusted a little bit or the evening routine or whatever it is, or the screen time or, or however you’re noticing there needs to be a change then try a new way of doing it and test and find out if that works.

The idea here is that you’re doing it consciously. You’re intentionally saying, okay, I’m noticing something that isn’t working in our routine, so I’m going to test and find out if something else can work more effectively. And you’re just like a scientist. You’re just like someone who’s in a leadership role in a company who’s trying to figure out, you know, the best way to, I don’t know, promote a new product or to, get things submitted on time from her employees. Whatever it is, it’s not that there is this one right way to do it, it’s that you have the mindset that you are going to intentionally try one way and then evaluate if it’s working or not and then try another way if you need to, if it doesn’t work. This is really important because I think what we can do is we can put so much pressure on ourselves to have like this perfect new routine right away that everyone just adjusts to seamlessly.

There’s no resistance and it works really well and then we can feel good about ourselves. And the truth is it’s so much different than that. The truth is that you will need to try lots of different ways potentially, and it’s going to require some resistance because you have lots of different people in your family and different challenges and different activities and different things going on, and none of that means something’s gone wrong. In fact, that is the way of it. It’s supposed to be that way. Here are some of the mindset mantras that I love for transitions, particularly for transitioning in the fall and back to school.

Number one, I expect there to be resistance in the transition. Number two, this is a period we are all adjusting to. Number three, we will settle into this new routine. Number four, I can test and find out what works well for our family. Number five, my kids are supposed to have challenges. Number six, I can support my kids and help them navigate their challenges as they arise. And number seven, I’m the chief culture officer of my home and I love setting in an example of having a good attitude for the day.

These are just seven mantras that resonate with me. Use them, borrow them if they’re helpful. You can also create your own mantras. So think about how you want to think about this, transition about routines, think about it, and then decide deliberately. I think that we often look to our circumstances to decide what to think, but I want to encourage you to look inward to you, to you as a leader in your family, and to decide what you want to think more deliberately without needing you know, your circumstances to be a certain way in order to, you know, have a good attitude or feel good or feel energized. You can create thoughts on purpose and practice them either in your journaling or just repeating them throughout the day. It really is life changing.

The next part of this I want to talk about is routines. So I love G Cal for planning all of the activities, all of the appointments, all the meetings, all the school programs. I use G Calendar, this is just Google Calendar for everything. I have no, incentive to promote this other than my own usage of it. You absolutely can use any tool that works for you. The reason that I love it is because it syncs to all of my devices. So if I’m on my phone or I’m on my, you know, iMac in my office or I am on my laptop, you know, downstairs or the iPad, GCal is connected to all of it. And then I can also use Google Calendar to sync other calendars.

So we have a family calendar that my husband and I both share. And then I also have a separate like work calendar within G Cal that I use to put what I’m going to work on and when, and I, you know, color coordinate it so that I can just visually see what’s going on with respect to, you know, maybe family activities versus work versus appointments. You name it, you can have any kind of calendar. I like that because I think it’s easier to make a habit than a physical planner. I, I love a good physical planner or journal. I think they’re like beautiful particularly journals because I don’t need them to sync everywhere. I don’t need to access them. But I will say the kind of pitfall of a written calendar is that it has to stay with you all of the time and I think it’s harder to move things around and adjust and to sync with other family members.

I just find it more challenging to actually help my life be easier. So I think Google Calendar or any type of, you know, online app calendar that you can use for the tool that can sync, that can make things easier is definitely the way to go. And we have all of these tools inside the membership. So right when you join, you get access to a time management and calendaring system that teaches you how to do the calendaring that I do. So if that’s something you’re looking for, I can absolutely help you with that inside the membership and then coach you on it for all of that added accountability. What I want to talk about here is thinking about your routines and a little bit different of a way. So you’re going to use G Calendar for all of the things, but I want you to have a strategy before you put things on your calendar.

So what kind of weekly planning do you want to do? Do you want to have a family meeting every week? Do you want to review upcoming activities and appointments for the week with your spouse? Do you want to meal prep and grocery shop? What things do you want to do on a weekly basis? Just kind of jot down a few that would be really helpful for your family and list them as part of what you want to do in your weekly routine. Then the other category is daily routines. So you have your morning routine, your daytime routine, your after school routine, your dinner routine, and your nighttime routine. Now we all do these anyways, but naming them out like this can be really helpful for you to identify what’s working and what’s not working. So for example, if you notice one of your kids is struggling with bedtime a lot and with screens, well if you have something that you’re looking at that has the routines separated out into morning, daytime after school, dinnertime and nighttime, you might first try, you know, putting the screen time in a different part of the day and see if that’s helpful.

I find that compartmentalizing the day in this way is really helpful for me to just show up as the mom who I genuinely want to be. So, you know, with little ones for me that that, dinner time routine into the nighttime routine, that is a challenging one. And so knowing that ahead of time and knowing that meal prep and planning and, the tasks that we have in a certain order, we always go on a family walk and all of those things, if I have that planned out, it makes it so much more seamless and enjoyable for everyone. You know, it’s like witching hour for the kids and as mom and my husband as well, we can help our kids transition even though we know that at least some of the days they’re going to have meltdowns or be upset or whatever it is.

It doesn’t mean anything’s gone wrong, it just means that oh, they’re transitioning from, you know, eating dinner to going on the dog walk is not something they want to do right now and that’s okay, we’re still going to do it, but in my mind, if I know that that’s because this is what I want for our family and I think it’s good for all of us to get outside and go on that walk even if they don’t want to, that keeps me in alignment with who I want to be instead of maybe questioning or doubting it based on my, you know, one of my son’s emotions in that moment. So again, this isn’t to like add in another routine, it’s just a different way for you to think about the routine that you already have. So what’s your morning routine? What’s your morning routine for your kids?

What’s the daytime routine? Do your kids go to school? Do you work, do you do home things? What are you doing during the day after school for you and for your kids? It’s like that late afternoon time, dinner time, are you cooking? Are you starting to cook in the afterschool routine? Are they helping? Are you meal planning? Are you not cooking? None of it is right or wrong, good or bad. It’s just bringing more intentionality to the routine to make your life easier. Now I know for some of you listening to this, you’re like, oh my gosh, this is just more things to do. And the answer to that is both yes and no. It is more work upfront, but the benefit is that it’s fewer things down the road. So let’s take meal planning whenever I meal plan and I grocery shop and I do all that ahead of time.

It does take more brainpower and more effort and more strategic thinking and all of that planning ahead of time that takes more energy and effort. But then just by doing that in a couple of hours on a Sunday, you know, Monday through Friday are so much easier versus, you know, sometimes when I don’t meal plan I forget or the day gets away from me and I don’t do it. You know, it’s Wednesday at four and I have nothing planned and it’s so much more stressful. And so I really focus on for me, the benefit of the routines and reminding myself of that so that I do them. Am I perfect? No, but this is like the goal for me and my family. It’s really helpful.

The last category of routines that you might want to kind of sit down and just think about is household management. So who’s doing the cleaning and the chores and the laundry? Do you have a nanny? Do you have tutors? Do you, include your finances in the household management? And if you have cleaners or any other kind of support or you whoever’s doing all of these things, having routines in place can be really helpful. And so just naming this as its own bucket outside of weekly routines and daily routines, this is like the household management routine. I think it’d be very powerful because, it’s easy for I think this category to, get left behind and before you know it, you’re sort of behind on all of the things, whether that’s laundry, whether that’s, you know, creating a budget could be anything. Alright, my friends, transitions, routines back to school. That’s what we are focusing on right now. Come inside the membership and get the Intentional Parenting class and all of the other classes that I referenced, the time management, the processing feelings, so you have the tools to support you, to support your family, to support your kids and your home and your spouse, all of it. I would love to coach you and teach you inside the membership. So join me over there and I will 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.