Prefer to listen to an audio format rather than straining your eyes to read yet more text on a screen? I’ve got you covered with my new voiceover option! If you like this option and want more of it, please let me know!
Have you ever had a kid ask you to do something fun that involves making a big mess? And have you then caught yourself fast-forwarding into spiraling thoughts about the future messes you’ll have to clean up? I know I have—many times!
Each time this has happened to me, my thoughts about the future have prevented me from fully participating in the playful fun of the moment. But how do you stop those spiraling thoughts when you’re working so hard to keep your head above water in the deep end of the adulting world?!
For most of my adult life, I’ve felt a bit like a duck: calm on the surface but legs paddling furiously under the water.
So for the first quarter of 2024, I decided to practice what I preach and fill out my own answers to the Strategic Workbook that I initially created out of a desire to help other people find more joy and less stress. Turns out, I think I might be benefiting from it more than anyone during what’s turned out to be an incredibly stressful start to the year.
What I’ve discovered by filling out the workbook (which turns out is very different than creating the workbook) is that sometimes it’s like cleaning out a closet: you have to make a big mess in order to weed through the junk and eventually, piece by piece, put everything back into a more organized system.
For about the last 6 weeks, I’ve felt like I’m sitting in the middle of a big, messy pile of junk, knowing what I want things to look like in the end, but stuck with the overwhelming feelings that often paralyze us from the next step. During this time, my husband has been going through a major career transition, where he left a stable corporate career to build his own business.
This is something that he and his business associates have been planning with meticulous detail for a long, long time. We knew this would be an incredibly stressful time for him professionally, and for our family too. We knew this would mean our very egalitarian approach to family and household duties would be temporarily thrown off balance during this transition period.
Knowing this theoretically, and then experiencing it in reality are two very different things. As a result, I’ve sometimes noticed myself growing resentful at how much more was piling onto my plate. As I should have expected…
As I should have expected, it’s one thing to help other people implement burnout prevention strategies, and an entirely different beast to put those strategies into practice in my own life.
In the process of filling out the workbook and recording sections of it into an audio format, I was able to zoom out a bit, and approach my life more like I would with a client. What I realized is that as easy as it can be to blame the temporary imbalance of household labor we’re currently working through, even under “normal” circumstances, I have to admit that I play an active (yet often subconscious) role in the division of our household duties. Maybe this mindset rings true for you, too, in some areas of your life. Here are some ways I find myself justifying a need to keep something on my to-do list:
“I’ll just do it myself, and then I’ll know it’s done the way I want.”
Or
“Asking someone else to do this means it’ll stay on my checklist until it’s complete anyway, and all of these things add up to a very heavy mental load! It’ll be faster for me to just do it and check it off.”
I've heard from some of you that this workbook has given you the same realization, so it's helpful to know I'm not alone with these mindsets!
What I’m realizing is that my tendency to just do it myself and make sure it's done "right" only ends up adding to my stress, resentment, and frustration. This hard truth this has helped me begin to let go of the control and judgement involved in my perfectionist tendencies.
My husband and I have found that the workbook is giving us new shared language and a starting point to re-evaluate which tasks can be:
shifted from one person to another
offloaded to outside hired help
completely removed or minimized from our lives as much as possible.
Once I’ve shifted one task off my to-do list, my challenge is figuring out how to realistically let that task go from my own mental checklist. This is a lot harder than it sounds. I’m discovering that it requires a high level of trust:
Trust that the person who is taking ownership of the task will get it done in a reasonable timeframe (talking about that timeframe during task assignment is essential in order to minimize frustration!)
Trust that things will not end in disaster if it’s not done to your specific standards. For example, letting go of my need for laundry to be folded a certain way has been quite freeing! In fact, I made a cool folding tool using a cardboard box, and it’s been a total game-changer in our house! Our 4th grader is now having fun and developing confidence in her ability to do her own laundry! Check out this “commercial” she made for the shirt folder:
Back to my initial question about how to stop letting the spiraling thoughts get in the way of fun. I’d like to share a real-life example of how all of this helped me build more family fun with the most epic sheet fort ever.
Picture this:
It’s Easter weekend and our daughter tells us the ONE thing she wants to do more than anything is to build a huge fort. First, I had to let go of all the fun things that I had in mind to make the holiday weekend festive. I get it—she’s 9, and not as excited as she used to be for the town’s annual egg hunt. Any other parents out there ever get so caught up in your own idea of family fun that you push the things YOU think will be most memorable? While well-intended, we can inadvertently ignore listening to the very requests that create some of the most cherished memories imaginable.
With this in mind, I said “yes let’s make that fort, and skip the egg hunt!” And then…
As we began to unfold ALL of the sheets I'd recently washed and folded after our LAST massive fort, I started to feel annoyed! Annoyed that I'd have to redo it all. Especially annoyed at the idea of re-folding the awful, dreaded fitted sheets!
When I realized I was getting grumpy about it, I thought “Hey, maybe I can take my own advice and remove this future task from my list!” So, l told my husband he could be in charge of doing the sheets after the fort came down. THEN I realized:
"Who am I even kidding? These sheets are just the extras that don't even go on a guest bed! The only time we use them is for forts, so why am I even bothering to wash them? WHO CARES if they're more wrinkled than a shar pei puppy!?! What would happen if I stopped caring about that?!"
With that, I let go of my self-imposed need to wash and fold the sheets altogether, and then I was able to have fun working together to build an incredible fort that took over our living room for the Easter weekend. I let go of fear of potential judgement from the dinner guests we would be hosting.
Eventually, after the sad but inevitable task of breaking down our epic fort, we took a new approach to the folding of our "fort sheets"-- inspired by the woman I want to be when I grow up (seriously, give this quick video a watch. Her tip is *chef's kiss*).
Anyway, I hope my story helps you begin to recognize some of your own unnecessary self-imposed standards and responsibilities, and rethink ways you could let other people take some tasks off your list—even if that means those tasks are not done "quite right."
The more I practice this, the more I delight in the way it frees up my ability to have fun and connect with both my kid AND my inner kid! I’ve discovered reconnecting with my inner kid is, in fact, the real "secret" to living with more joy.
If you’re interested in checking out the Strategic Workbook but worried that you’re too far behind now, I have great news for you: the whole premise of the workbook is that it’s never too late to begin. Every day is a chance to reset and revitalize your life! Click here to request access!
Worried about adding yet another activity into your already busy schedule? I can relate! That's why I decided to make sections of the workbook available in audio format, so you can listen to portions of it while you’re on the go!
As much as I want it all to be a one and done approach, I’m discovering that it’s all about building some new habits and mindsets, which takes intentional, daily practice. I try to remember, we’re each a work in progress, not a work in perfection!
Your Fellow Work in Progress,
Jessica