Why mindset matters for moms
Hey mom friends! I wanted to write this post to give you an overview of why mindset matters for moms. I know mindset is probably not the first thing you think about when you are looking for solutions to the frustrations of potty training, or dealing with your teenagers mood swings (or your own for that matter). But that’s where I come in...In my 30+ years of marriage, raising 6 kids, and managing a home and a business, I have learned that the best place to start to tackle any problem is in my head.
Your mind is your most powerful tool and your best weapon to help you be calm, feel happy, and deal with all the ups-and-downs of marriage, parenting, and family life.
Maybe the best way to explain this is to think about the effect on your mood that comes from listening to music. Maybe you put on upbeat music when you clean, or you put on quiet music when you want your kids to calm down and go to sleep in the car? Whatever the situation, I’m sure you can think of examples of how music can almost instantly change your mood and energy.
Why is that? It’s because music is made up of sentences (lyrics) that direct our thoughts a certain way, and vibrations from the sounds that create a certain energy in our bodies.
The same thing happens every time we think different thoughts. The thoughts in our minds create a feeling in our bodies in the same way music does. Those feelings create vibrations that make us feel happy or sad, calm or anxious etc.
And here’s the thing...A lot of the thoughts we think are repetitive, kind of like a song playing on repeat. Those repetitive thoughts, positive or negative, create what I call a mindset. Without even realizing it, we continuously react to the same situations, in the same way, day after day. The awesome part about that is that we can quickly raise our awareness of our mindset. When we do, we can begin to get leverage over virtually any situation without waiting for the people and situations in our lives to change.
Below I’ve listed a few examples of how mindset can impact us in different areas of our mom-life. There are too many to list, but here are some to get you thinking.
Family Relationships
When people think of fixing or improving a relationship, they don’t think first of their mindset about their relationship. Usually they think about what the other person is doing and how that is influencing the relationship.
But the truth is we get into patterns of relating. Kids do X, we respond with Y, and the same situations play out over and over again. We tend to think this happens just because when the kids act in a certain way it pushes our buttons, but it’s really because of our thought patterns.
We have so many thoughts each day! Some experts say it’s as high as 80,000 thoughts a day. Whatever the number, the sad truth is that many of these are negative, and a huge number of them are repetitive.
So with your kids, your husband, and your mother-in-law, you tend to have the same thoughts over and over, and that dictates your behavior. This means that the same scenarios play out in more or less the same way over and over again. For an example of this, check out this post where I wrote about the day my kids stopped driving me crazy.
So from toddlers to teens, and everything in between, how we are thinking about our kids and our other family relationships is what is making or breaking the relationship. That’s actually super good news, because the simplest thing to start to change is your thinking. ***Note that I said simple not easy. It takes some self reflection and determination to recognize and take responsibility for your thoughts and change them.***
The payoff can be huge in terms of our relationships if we look at how we’re thinking and make an effort to think about our family members in a new and better way that makes us feel more love for them. Doing this puts us squarely in the driver seat of our lives, and can start to immediately bring changes in how we feel day-to-day. We really do have the power within us to stop feeling frustrated, angry, anxious, overwhelmed etc.
Just to give you a quick example of how this works, think about when you see your baby sleeping and you just melt. That is because your thoughts are something like “Oh my goodness, look how sweet my baby looks!” You think that and then you get all warm and fuzzy inside.
But when our toddler throws a tantrum, or our teenagers talk back, our thoughts tend to be more along the lines of “I am so frustrated with this kid right now!” Those kinds of thoughts are totally optional, and they put us in a grumpy frame of mind. Soon we are the ones being grumpy, dramatic, and having a “temper tantrum” of our own.
In these types of situations we can choose instead to take the time to be calm and come from a place of love as we deal with our family members.
Marriage Relationship
When we are in a committed relationship for any length of time, patterns of relating start to develop. Just like I mentioned above, those patterns become unconscious so we don’t even recognize they’re there.
If the marriage relationship is good, we might not even know why, or how we can make it even better. If our marriage struggles in some area, looking at our own thought patterns is the quickest way to get leverage to change the situation.
Husbands and wives are responsible for so many things in the home, and we may have very different approaches to those things. Whether it’s money, raising the kids, or issues with intimacy in marriage, recognizing our own thinking in those kinds of situations will help us proactively improve so we can stop arguing and start working together to make things better.
If you’re already thinking that your spouse needs to change their thinking and the way they do things, that’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to tell you that you can’t control how your spouse thinks or acts, but you can change how you react and respond.
I’ll have so much more on this in future posts, but for now I’d encourage you to start seeing where positive and negative thinking patterns exist in your marriage relationship. As you start to recognize patterns, you can decide if they are serving you and helping you create the marriage that you really want.
Time and Home Management
Isn’t there so much involved in managing a home? People used to use the term homemaker a lot and I love that term. It sounds so intentional, like we are purposely making our home what we want it to be.
Moms are the heart of the home. We do so much of the scheduling, the organizing, the cleaning, the cooking, the shopping, and the loosely defined part where we just try to keep everyone happy and alive. 😋
Our thinking can play a huge key here.
For example, one of the things I’ve struggled with for years is planning menus and making dinners consistently. It’s literally like dinner has caught me by surprise every night for 30 years! I can get really hung up in my head about who will like what foods, and frustrated with myself if I didn’t plan ahead and now I am missing an ingredient to make dinner. Things like that get me all flustered, and that kind of thinking doesn’t help me do a good job with the basic task of making dinner!
Awhile back I started asking myself what I was thinking about dinner that was tripping me up. I mean, really how hard can it be to get a decent dinner on the table? Well for me it was hard, and I wasn’t totally sure why. I started to recognize my thoughts like the ones I mentioned above. One kid won’t like it. I don’t have the right ingredients for that thing they will like. I’m so disorganized with menu planning and shopping! Why do I have to go to the store 4 times a week? What is my basic problem?!
After looking at my thinking, it quickly became clear where the problem was. It was in between my ears! My brain was feeding me a steady stream of thoughts about my failings when it comes to making dinner. Duh, no wonder I wasn’t getting any better at it! So I simply came up with a new thought and it makes me feel a million times better! Now when I start to worry about what’s for dinner, I say to myself I can always make something good.
That’s it. That one simple thought has helped me relax, take the pressure off, and get dinner on the table much more often. Still not everyone likes what I make, and sometimes I forget stuff I need for my meals, but my feelings and my energy around meal time have totally changed for the better with just one simple shift in my mindset.
Dinner and planning menus is just one example of how we can start with our thinking to start to create a new, more satisfying result in any area of home management. Start with looking at your thoughts about the kid's chores, the laundry, the shopping, the yardwork, etc. If you have a steady stream of negative thoughts about these things, start to question those thoughts. From there you can start to replace negative thoughts with positive ones that will help you manage your home more effectively. (I'll give you lots more ideas how to actually do that in future posts.)
P.S. When I say I can always make something good, what I mean by that is that I can always make waffles. I always have the stuff for waffles and waffles are good. Therefore I can always make something good. Sometimes I also have bacon, and bacon is next level. I am my family’s hero if there is bacon+waffles. ;)
Money Management
A lot of experts say that disagreements about money are one of the major causes of divorce. If that’s true, it’s good news (in a way) because disagreements are yet another thing that is created by our thoughts. Our thoughts create our actions, and that’s what leads to arguing.
The super good news here is that you can have your own money mindset regardless of what your spouse thinks about money. When you have a positive approach to money, it is so much easier to work with your spouse to create a budget and manage the money, even if you have very different ways of thinking about and managing money.
Managing money is both a skill and a mindset. You can for sure learn the skills, and if you combine that with a positive money mindset you can see some amazing changes for the better. You can have less money stress and make more of your income, starting as soon as you tune into your thinking and see what needs to change there.
Everything Else…
I could go on and talk about things like how we think about finding personal time and fulfillment as moms, and creating more energy so we’re not so dang tired all the time. (You feel me?)
But as Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride...There is too much, let me sum up….
Everything starts with your thoughts. If you are willing to put in the mental effort, and then do the work, you can create any result you want in your #momlife.
You can overcome overwhelm and get on top of the housework, the cooking and the chores..
You can feel calm and in control of your own emotions when the people in your family are losing their *stuff*. :)
You can find time for you and grow in ways that are important to you.
You can become the boss of your money and change the financial future of your family.
You can create a better marriage, even if the one you’ve got is already pretty dang good!
You can have more energy and excitement for life.
And maybe most importantly, you can give yourself grace and room to grow in this whole process while you work toward becoming the wife, mom and woman you want to be.
If you want to know more, please subscribe to get my mom-mindset mail and keep checking back for new content and ideas.
You got this momma!
XOXO
Rachel
