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There are some topics that regularly come up in the coaching I do with my clients, so while I’m on a summer break for the next couple of weeks, I’m bringing these topics from the pre-COVID days back to the podcast. Today’s episode is all about transitions, and if you’re trying to change anything in your life, or you’re dealing with a change in circumstances you don’t feel like you have control over, I guarantee this episode will be super useful.
As humans, we generally find that transitions are uncomfortable. This applies to both big life-changing moves, and the tiny everyday transitions like moving from one task to another, or developing a new habit. However, you can make any transition in your life more comfortable, and I’m showing you how.
Tune in this week to discover what’s going on when you’re going through transitions in your life. I’m sharing why times of transition are an emotional struggle, and I’m showing you how you can prepare to make decisions that serve you during times of transition in your life.
I’m hosting a Try Out Coaching webinar! This is a free live workshop where you’ll get an opportunity to see what coaching is like. If you’ve ever had questions about coaching and whether it’s the right fit for you, you don’t want to miss this. It’s totally free, so click here to join me on Wednesday, August 23rd 2023 at 9am Pacific.
What You’ll Learn on this Episode:
- Why transitions, both big and small, can be uncomfortable.
- My own experience of struggling through transition.
- What has helped me find peace during times of transition.
- The small transitions you make throughout your daily life without realizing they’re happening.
- How to make decisions that you like during times of transition.
- My practical tips for being aware of your brain when you’re going through a transition.
Mentioned on the Show:
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- Grab the Podcast Roadmap!
- Better Than Happy: Connecting with Divinity through Conscious Thinking by Jody Moore
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- Check out this episode on my YouTube channel
- 176. Transitions
- Brooke Castillo
I’m Jody Moore and this is Better Than Happy, episode 422, Encore: Transitions.
This is Better Than Happy, the podcast where we study what the healthiest, most successful people in today’s world think, feel and do. And we leverage this knowledge to create our best lives. Are you ready, little bird? Let’s fly.
Hello everybody, welcome to the podcast. I am taking a summer break, a two week summer break, don’t worry. But what I wanted to do, I’m going to girls’ camp with the girls from my ward. And I’m just taking a little bit of downtime. So there are a couple of episodes that either get talked about all the time and/or come up in the coaching I do all the time. And so I wanted to play those for you, one of them this week and one next week. And even if you heard them before, they’re from, gosh, a long time ago, five, six years ago.
So you probably don’t remember them, I didn’t, I went back and listened to them, I’m like, “Those are good, we’re using those.” So listen again even if you heard them. Many of you probably are new to the podcast since then and maybe missed them. Today’s episode is called Transitions. The reason I picked this one is because I recently went on somebody else’s podcast and when she was interviewing me, she mentioned this topic of transitions and how much it had impacted her. And I went back and looked it up and it turns out that one was published originally in 2018, which was pretty long ago.
Doesn’t it feel like anything pre COVID is like a whole another lifetime? Anyway, so she made that comment and then my husband who really doesn’t listen all that faithfully because I think he thinks he already knows what I teach, and he does, he’s heard it all a lot and he’s around it all the time. At any rate, he mentioned it, he said, “Remember that one podcast you did on transitions?” And I always pay attention when something comes up that close together. It was in the same week that that other woman mentioned it and then my husband mentioned it.
And whenever something happens like that, that close together that seems to be an unusual topic that wouldn’t normally come up, I pay attention. And so I took that as kind of some inspiration that I should share that episode again. So I think you’re going to love this, it’s especially helpful if you’re trying to change a habit because for me I discovered it with regards to my eating habits. But you can apply it to a lot of different things.
Just a quick reminder, if you haven’t already signed up to come and try out coaching with me, that is happening this week. So last chance. It’s totally free. Come and experience the power of these tools actually applied in real life at jodymoore.com/trial. I’ll see you there. Have a good one.
Today we’re going to talk about transitions. I had this awareness for myself recently, and it’s been so insightful for me that I was like oh my gosh, I have to do a podcast on this because it’s been really, really eye opening and it’s kind of one of those things, like when you get some insight into yourself and into your own brain and into where you are preventing your own growth in certain ways that it’s kind of freeing.
I don’t know if this is going to apply to all of you, but I’m sure it will apply to some of you, probably to a lot of you. So I’ve realized for myself recently that transitions are really uncomfortable to me. Not uncomfortable in a really obvious way, mostly, although we’re going to talk about big transitions and smaller transitions.
The realization I’ve had has been that the little, tiny everyday transitions from one task to another or from one part of my life to another are just a little bit uncomfortable to me. And that is the place where I like to buffer. So the reason I was able to make this discovery is because first of all, I do a lot of self-coaching.
I pay attention to myself. I pay attention to my discomfort and not so that I can always solve it, but just so that I can understand it. And I’ve also cut out snacking. I used to want to just grab a little something at various times throughout my day. Maybe it was a little snack, maybe it was a diet Coke.
And as I’ve cut that out, what’s left when you cut out buffers is just your own discomfort. And that is how I gained the awareness that I now have. And I should say that I cut out snacking quite a while ago. It’s not a brand new thing. So it’s not like I discovered it overnight. It’s just as I’ve allowed myself to be uncomfortable, not having a snack.
My coach Brooke Castillo always says that snacking is always an emotional event, right? And that nothing is worth snacking over. So as I’ve cut it out, I’ve been in that place of discomfort and wrestling with trying to figure out what it’s about and how to solve for the discomfort. And that’s when I had this realization that for me, many times it’s about transitions.
It’s about the discomfort of a transition. So I want to talk, like I said, about kind of what we would say are maybe big transitions. And then I want to talk also about smaller kind of everyday transitions. And we’re going to look at the two and look at the similarities. And I want to give you some tools and tell you what I’m doing to solve for this in my own life.
So, I knew before I cut out snacking and before I had this discovery that big transitions are a challenge for me, or historically they have been. I feel like I’ve gotten better at them, but definitely they’re something that in my past, I really struggled with the first time. I remember it being extremely challenging was when I graduated from college.
Many of you know, I went to college at Utah State. In Logan, and I loved it there, and I had amazing friends there. And quite frankly, I did not want to leave college once I graduated. I remember walking into the career center and they said to me, can we help you? And I said, yeah, I would like a career, please.
I feel like college does many amazing things for us, but for me, I didn’t feel prepared for the real world. I think maybe somewhere in my mind, I thought I would be married by the time I graduated from college or something. And so I hadn’t really thought about what would come next. So leaving college was really challenging for me.
I moved to Salt Lake City, so I wasn’t too far away from Logan. But I was still in a brand new city. I got a job as an intern. It was a paid internship. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. I had a degree in journalism and communications. I had not really thought about my life beyond that point.
And so I got this internship and I basically sat in a cubicle all day for eight hours, which I was not used to doing. If you think about college life, you go to class for a few hours and I would go to work for a few hours and my life was just really dynamic in college and it went from that to sitting in a cubicle for eight hours and to make matters worse, I didn’t really have a lot of responsibility so I was actually very bored.
I would sit in that cubicle at my computer and wait until somebody came and asked me to proofread a document, which is not my strength, by the way. Those of you who get my emails know that. Or they would ask me to go run an errand to get some copies made or something like that.
So I didn’t feel a lot of ownership in the work I was doing. I wasn’t challenged. It was a really, really difficult time. So on top of all that, I’m living in the city. Where I don’t really know anybody other than the girl who moved with me, who I kind of knew from Utah state, she was an amazing, sweet girl named Kelly and we had a blast together, but I didn’t know her very well in the beginning and I had left behind all of my good friends in Logan, my sister, my boyfriend, all the things that I knew and the people that I knew and the places that I knew.
I was so lonely. I remember thinking, how is it that I can be surrounded by so many people and feel so lonely? I felt so lost. It was a really, really difficult transition for me. My mom came out from Washington to visit me to try to help me out because I was struggling my sister and friends from Logan would come on occasion on what they call the rescue missions to try to bolster me up. And there were also a couple of guys who happened to be my boyfriend’s friends.
My boyfriend was still in Logan. My boyfriend at the time and a couple of his buddies lived in Salt Lake and so they were nice enough to allow me to come and hang out at their place a little bit and kind of take me under their wing. So I had tons of support and help, but I still struggled so much with that transition. And it wasn’t until I finally became more familiar with Salt Lake, made a few more friends and quit that internship and just started waiting tables and substitute teaching.
That I came out of this dark cloud that I was in, I decided who cares if I have a college degree, I don’t like sitting in a cubicle for eight hours, making copies. I would rather wait tables and substitute teach. And I did that and it was amazing. But anyway, that was probably the most difficult transition of my life.
A few years after that, I moved to Huntington Beach with a friend. Not as challenging of a transition because, hello, Huntington Beach, California. It was beautiful and the singles ward there is amazing and I was with a friend and that was a little bit easier, but still kind of scary for me. Getting married, of course, is a big transition that I struggled with a little bit. I think I struggled with it definitely more than my husband did.
So we have these big transitions, right? And for some of you, maybe it’s all of your children growing up and leaving the house or all of your kids starting school or some of the similar transitions to the ones that I’ve experienced. But here’s what I want to kind of step back and have us think about when it comes to transitions. Especially these big ones.
This is why I think they’re so challenging. First of all, a transition requires that we make a lot of decisions. Making decisions is exhausting to our brain. Back when I graduated from college and moved to Salt Lake, I didn’t know what I know now, which is there is no right decision. There is no wrong decision.
So not only is it kind of exhausting because it requires that we access our higher brain, that cerebral cortex, critical thinking, logical part of the brain, but also they can be emotional. If we tie a lot of emotions to our decisions and we believe that decisions are going to create the results for us, then it becomes emotionally draining making all those decisions as well.
Transitions mean that there’s a lot of unknown and our brains do not like unknown. Our brains want to know exactly what to expect because unknown is scary. Unknown could be hard. But unknown means we can’t prepare. So, a transition means so much unknown. In many situations, a transition means a change in your relationships.
Certainly that was the case for me when I moved to Salt Lake is that the people that I was used to seeing every day that I was comfortable around, that I felt really connected and close to, I suddenly wasn’t seeing anymore. And now there were all these new relationships with people that I didn’t know, and it required me to figure out who I am and how to show up in all of these new relationships.
That can be exhausting to us, right? To not have that comfort zone to land in in our lives. For many, many people, a big transition like that feels like a change of your identity. It feels like a loss of your identity. If your identity is tied to the things that you do or the place that you live or the people that you interact with, then when that changes, the transition will feel very frightening.
Because we want to hold on to our identity. We want to know who we are and we want to be able to just show up and not have to think about who we’re going to be. So again, this was definitely the case for me when I graduated from college is suddenly was around all of these new people who didn’t know me and I didn’t know who I was in this new phase of life.
I see that a lot with, again, women that I coach who have children leaving the house or maybe they’re getting ready to retire there or their husbands are getting ready to retire. And it’s this really emotional time of figuring out who am I now? What do I do now? So all of this is the reason that transitions can be so challenging.
There’s a lot of higher brain thinking required. I think about any time I’ve moved and I feel some of this struggle of the transition. I think about even going to the grocery store and walking in and going, I don’t know where everything is in this grocery store. In my grocery store that I used to go to, I know exactly where the bread is and I know where the cereal is and where the milk is and the eggs and I just walk around. I have my routine right of which end of the store you start on and how you move through the store. And here I don’t know where anything is.
It’s a very kind of exhausting and uncomfortable feeling, right? I remember when my family and I moved from Huntington Beach up to Sacramento area. We lived in, in Roseville and then in Rockland for a little while. And I remember getting there and thinking I kind of knew my way around. And then one day I told my husband, I’m going to run to Target and get something. And I couldn’t get to Target. And I was like, where is Target? And it was kind of emotional for me because I thought it doesn’t feel like home if I don’t even know how to get to Target.
And so I would get out the map on my phone and I would kind of study the map and memorize the map because I like to know my way around. It makes me feel more comfortable. It makes me feel more at home. And all of that is because then my higher brain doesn’t have to kick in. I can just delegate it to the lower brain like I’m used to doing.
So the brain hates all of that. The brain wants to continue to delegate everything to the lower brain and to continue to do what it’s always done. And so when we shake things up, when we move or we make a big change in our lives or a big change just happens to us, the brain doesn’t like it. This is why transitions are so uncomfortable.
So like I said, I’ve known this about myself for a long time, but what I didn’t realize until recently is that the little, tiny transitions that happen every day for me are also uncomfortable. They’re not scary in the same way. They’re not as draining. They’re not as dramatic, which is why I don’t think I even realized it before.
But they still are the time when I find I want to grab a few nuts, grab a Diet Coke, grab something to buffer away from the discomfort. For example, when I’m done working, I work at home three days a week in my home office from nine to three, and when three o’clock rolls around, it’s just a little bit uncomfortable for me.
It’s leaving my office and going out into my home to be with my children and to spend time with them and get some things done around the house and make dinner and drive kids around if necessary. All of that is what happens next, right? One of the things that I’ve realized as I’ve really examined myself in this is that transitioning from something more structured to something more unknown is especially uncomfortable for me, something less structured, something unpredictable.
And when I’m working, I’m pretty structured. I schedule out my day. I have things on my calendar that I know are going to happen, and I get to choose, how I’m going to fill in the time in between and I try to always plan that in advance. So it’s fairly structured. When I’m with my family, it’s unpredictable, right? I don’t know which child is going to need me or what’s going to happen or what might go wrong or even how I’m going to be spending my time always. So, that unstructured, unpredictable place is more uncomfortable to me, and so transitioning to that feels uncomfortable.
When I do get into something, maybe I’m playing with Oliver on the Xbox, because lately he wants my husband or I to play Xbox with him all the time. It’s awesome. I’m getting really good at Super Smash Brothers, which is I think the dumbest game ever. But anyway, that’s what he likes to do. And so sometimes I do it.
So even when it’s time to stop that or stop whatever else I’m doing and then get up and go make dinner, there’s a little bit of discomfort when it’s time to go somewhere. Maybe I’m going to run one of the kids somewhere or I’m going to run an errand to go to the grocery store. As soon as I get in the car- we have a, a fridge in the garage and I used to grab a Diet Coke every time I got in the car. And now I don’t drink Diet Coke hardly ever. So I grab a sparkling water or something instead, but I always want to grab a drink. Now I’ve created a habit of that, but I think again, it has to do with the transition of leaving my house and going to somewhere else and now I’m going to engage in something different.
When it’s time to get the kids to bed, you guys have heard me talk about the bedtime routine before and how uncomfortable that is for me. And I think it’s because it’s a transition time and trying to get everybody settled and then get myself settled is just sort of this restless, uncomfortable feeling.
So anyway, this is what I mean by the little transitions that happen throughout the day. You have your own version of them. That’s what mine look like. Those are the times when I want to grab a snack to buffer away from the discomfort. And I hear my clients give me examples of this too, all the time. Sometimes my clients disguise it for themselves. I don’t think they realize it’s about a transition, but I was coaching a woman the other day who was also wanting to not snack anymore.
And she said, I just don’t know what to do. Once I put my kids down for their nap, I normally go have a little snack. It’s like a little reward for myself that the kids are down for a nap and now this is my time. But isn’t it interesting to think about, isn’t your kids being down for a nap and you having a little break reward enough?
Why do we have to have a snack to buffer away from it? Maybe it’s actually a little bit uncomfortable. Maybe you don’t know what to do at that time, or you have a lot of thoughts you have to argue with in your head about what you should do versus what you feel like doing. Or maybe you don’t feel like doing anything, or maybe this time is going to go too fast and where do I begin? And maybe all of that, some version of that discomfort anyway, is a reason that you want to have. A snack. I don’t know. It’s interesting.
And this isn’t just about snacking, by the way, if you want a snack, go for it. And I love you all the same. I just want you to notice if transitions are uncomfortable for you. And I want to give you again, some things to consider. So let’s take a look at what we talked about when it comes to The bigger transitions and let’s see if it applies to these smaller everyday transitions.
So the first thing we talked about was the decision making that has to occur, all the many decisions that have to occur when we move or have a big transition. Is that true with smaller ones? Yes, for sure. For me, it is. As soon as I’m done working, then I have to make decisions like, what am I going to do now?
And like I said about my client whose kids go down for the nap, I have that same argument in my head. What I should do versus what I feel like doing and trying to remember the things I said I was going to do, like that one cupboard I still want to clean out or things like that. Right? So, just making a decision is tiring, but then we add the negotiating with my children, the negotiating with myself that happens on top of it all, it makes sense that that would be a challenging time for me.
We also said with big decisions, or excuse me, with big transitions, that there’s a lot of unknown. Is that true in these smaller transitions? Yes, definitely. I had this experience just the other day. I had a really early appointment to get my eyelashes filled because that’s important. And anyway, I was driving home from that appointment and I kept having this thought like, I should pick up donuts.
So it was only like, I don’t know, 8:30 by the time I was getting home because it was kind of early appointment. And so, you know, I thought I should, I should stop and pick up donuts. I could bring some home to the kids and Jake and they would be excited and I could have a donut. And I just kept thinking that.
And I was like, what is happening? Like I don’t really eat donuts hardly ever anymore. Why do I keep having this desire to get a donut? And I’m trying to disguise it as doing something for my family, but really I just wanted a donut. And I realized it’s that transition. I’m heading home and I don’t know what it’s going to be like there.
I don’t know if my kids are going to be happy or not. I don’t know if the house is going to be picked up or it’s going to be a mess. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get the things done that I want to, or I’m not going to get any of that done. So there’s all that unknown, right? As we transition in these small ways in our lives.
How about the relationships? I said that sometimes transitions, big transitions mean a change in the way we get to engage in the relationships in our lives. And I think that can be the case in these smaller transitions, right? Sometimes we’re transitioning to being with people to now being alone for a while or the people that we’re with change.
So I definitely think there’s maybe a component of that as well. The last one we talked about was that change in your identity or the feeling like there’s been a change in your identity. And I think this is the case too, in our smaller daily transitions, because I go from Jody, the coach, where I feel really confident and I feel excited and I feel motivated and I feel like people love the work I’m doing and it feels valuable and important.
And then I go from that to Jody the mom, which I know is important work and I believe is important work, but it doesn’t, I don’t feel like I’m as good at it. I don’t feel as confident about it. I don’t feel like everybody loves me as well as my clients do. So it is that change in identity, right? I go from being the client of the girl who does my lashes to again, being a mom or, or a wife or some other role. When I’m at my parents visiting my mom and dad, I’m in that space of being a daughter and often find that I don’t want to leave there.
I just want to stay there because then I’m going to transition to something else, right? And staying there in that space and in the comfort of all that just feels easier. So again, transitions require that we get into a more conscious state, that we make decisions, that we use the higher brain. And so that is always going to be a little less comfortable to us and a little snack takes the edge off and makes it more fun.
So I don’t find that I consciously logically think about these things like, oh, now I have to go do that necessarily. Again, as I’ve cut out snacking and I’ve just been willing to be uncomfortable and sit with the discomfort, I’ve really discovered that this may be what it’s about for me are the transitions.
I want to give you one other example. Imagine that you’re at church. You’re sitting in a class like gospel doctrine or something, and you’re sitting there in one state, right? You’re listening to the lesson. Maybe you’re following along in your scriptures and participating a little bit, but you’re sitting there in this state, mostly consuming and listening.
And then the teacher says, okay, for this next part, I want everyone to get into groups of four and I’m going to give you a question to think about and talk about, and then I’m going to have you share it with us. Tell me what your first thought is. Oh, man, why do we have to do that, right? And it’s not because you don’t want to discuss, you don’t want to work with three other people.
Maybe you even know that that’s actually a really good teaching technique that helps to get you more engaged and helps you learn more. It’s not any of that. It’s just that your brain doesn’t want to transition like that. Your brain doesn’t want to have to make a decision about, well, who am I going to work with and where are we going to sit?
And how’s this going to go? All of that just requires a little bit more work for your brain. And that’s why we don’t want to make a transition like that. I also, as I was preparing this thought about an experience I had when I lived in California, I went to a visiting teaching conference. You know how back when we did visiting teaching, we used to, I think once a year have like a visiting teaching conference of some sort. And in the ward, and this was on a Saturday morning and it was at the church.
And so we all showed up and they had like. Really yummy breakfast type food for us and a quick message. And then they said, okay, so the purpose of these conferences is to help us all get better at doing our visiting teaching. And so we may, sometimes we spend time talking about how to do the visits or how to get to know our sisters or how to invite the spirit or something like that.
But we really feel like in this ward, everybody knows pretty well how to visit teach and we know what we should be doing. We just need to get out and do it. So rather than stay here for the next hour and a half or so and talk about that, we’re just going to go visit people. So we’ve printed off names and addresses of some sisters in our ward who need some visits.
We’d like you to pair up getting groups of two or three or four or whatever and carpool and go and visit a few sisters. Just go stop by and we have a little something for you to take to them and a message. And I was like, what? I just got punked, right? I just came here to sit and listen to someone talk to me and have a cinnamon roll.
What is going on? I got to go visit people now. So that transition of wait, I got to figure out who to go with and I got to talk to people I don’t know and I got to get in the car and go outside and what are we talking about? I just came to sit here and consume. Of course it turned out to be so awesome.
We went and visited some sisters. I got to know some sisters in my ward I didn’t know. I got to visit some other women who I didn’t know, and they were so excited to see us and it was fantastic. But my brain resisted the transition.
So what do we do about it though? How do we minimize the discomfort of this or solve for this? Well, I have a few ideas here. The first one is to do more planning in advance. I got to tell you, I hate to say this because those of you who know me know that planning is not my favorite thing and it’s not my forte, but I’m getting better at it. And I do have to say that it works. I’m really good at it in my business because I trained myself to be good at it.
And it helps me be more efficient. It helps me not get overwhelmed and it helps me run my business the way I need to, but I’m not really great at it still in the other areas of my life or haven’t applied it, I should say in the other areas of my life. So that’s one of the things I’m going to commit to doing.
I’m going to plan in advance rather than get done working and leave and go, well, what should I do now? I’m going to sit down at the beginning of the week, just like I do in my business and make a list of all the things I think I want to get done that week and I’m going to put them on my calendar so I know on Tuesday when I’m done working, what I’m going to go do.
I think another option, if you don’t want to calendar it out and you don’t want to get to that level of detail, is to at least keep a list of the things that you want to get done. I don’t know about you, but I have this kind of running to do list in my mind, but when I have a little time, I don’t think about it.
I don’t remember it. Last night, my husband opened up one of the cupboards in the butler’s pantry area, and this snow globe fell out and crashed all over. And broke and we had water and ceramic pieces and fake snow all over the counter and the hardwood floors and glass. And anyway, we cleaned it up, but my first thought was, oh, yeah, I still haven’t cleaned out that cupboard. Like there’s a snow globe just shoved in there from last Christmas that doesn’t belong there. And it’s falling out now because I need to clean out the cupboard.
So those are the types of things, right? And as long, along with like the other things that you just know you need to get done that week, you keep a running list. So when you have that pocket of time, like the kids just went down for a nap or, or some window of time opens up, you can even just go to your list and decide, okay, which one do I want to get done today? Where do I want to begin? But a little planning in advance keeps you from having to make that decision, right?
I want to make sure that when you plan, this doesn’t mean… sometimes when I tell people calendar everything, they think that means that you have to be busy and productive every minute of your day. And that’s not what I’m saying at all. Schedule leisure time, schedule time to just do whatever you feel like doing in that moment.
Schedule time to be with the kids. Or whatever else you want to schedule in, but this is just about making decisions ahead of time, sitting down and having a meeting with yourself and making decisions about how you’re going to spend your time so that you don’t have to make those decisions in the moment when you’re tired and you’re transitioning and it feels overwhelming.
The second thing that you can try is to block schedule as much as possible to minimize the number of transitions that you’re making. Every time we have to change tasks, we have to go through these challenges of transition. And in fact, the research even shows that we lose productivity the more we change tasks because it takes some time and effort for our brains to refocus on what we’re doing.
So if you can block schedule things as much as possible, you minimize that problem. So, for example. I work three full days instead of five half days because if I can work a full day, I can stay in work mode longer and minimize the transition between work and my life. You can block out the housework, right?
This is the time when I’m doing housework. Versus spreading it out throughout the week. When I used to coach clients one on one, I figured out after a while that I needed to block schedule my coaching so that I could be in coaching mode with my clients. And then I block schedule marketing rather than try to fit marketing or, or blogging or content creation or something like that.
In between coaching calls, I started grouping it together. All the marketing goes together, maybe on one day or on a half a day. And the coaching goes together on the other times so that I can keep my brain in coaching mode or writing mode. So sometimes block scheduling isn’t. Something that you have the option to do, but certainly when you do, I recommend it.
The third thing is to create routines with intention. Routines are the way that our brain delegates things to the lower brain. And so it really minimizes the discomfort of transition. It minimizes the decisions. It minimizes all of that. So that’s why for a lot of our children, we have a bedtime routine because it helps them transition to, okay, this is the time when I settle down and go to sleep to go through whatever that bedtime routine is.
So, can you have a routine for yourself? This is what I’m going to start doing. I’m going to have a routine for when the kids get home from school, a routine for when I’m done working and it’s no longer going to be grabbing a snack. Maybe it’s going to be 30 minutes to an hour of time that I’m focused, that I’m just with my kids, I’m not on a device. I’m not doing housework. I’m just spending that 30 to 60 minutes with the kids. Maybe that’s the first step.
And then maybe there’s one hour of some kind of a project I want to get done around the home. And then I’m thinking about dinner, right? If I just created a routine of like three blocks of time would get me through that dinnertime, which is a challenging time of day for me.
Maybe every day after I’m done working I create a routine where we go for a walk. I put my little kids in the stroller and we go for a walk. I bet if I did that after a while, my kids would start expecting it. They would look forward to it. I would look forward to it and I wouldn’t have to decide what am I going to do now?
I would just know this is the time when I go for a walk. So create routines during those less structured, less predictable times of your day. And then the fourth and final thing I want to offer is to just expect the discomfort of it. It’s really not a problem. I’m sort of in this place where I’m thinking, you know, I’m going to try out these things.
I’m going to plan. I’m going to create routines. I’m going to do all of these things I’ve explained to you guys, and maybe that will help. Maybe I’ll adjust and maybe I’ll get rid of some of this discomfort, but maybe not. I just might always feel this way during transition, and it’s totally fine. I just know that that’s just what’s going on.
It’s just my brain not wanting to have to think hard and I can totally handle the restlessness of it and I’m certainly capable of thinking hard and it’s not a problem and it’s certainly not something that I need to buffer away from. All right. Have a good one you guys. I will see you next week.
Coaching changed my life and I’ve watched it change the lives of thousands of men and women since, but is it right for you? You’ll only know by giving it a try. Try it out today at jodymoore.com/trial.
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