Read the transcript of this episode:
Depression, anxiety, and autoimmune symptoms after birth is not how it's supposed to be. There is a much better way, and I'm here to show you how to do just that. Hey, my friend, I'm Maranda Bower, a mother to four kids and a biology student turned scientist obsessed with changing the world through postpartum care. Join us as we talk to mothers and the providers who serve them and getting evidence-based information that actually supports the mind, body, and soul in the years after birth.
Hey everyone, it's Maranda Bower here, and we're entering the new year and I tell you what I am so freaking pumped.
There is nothing like a new year and new intentions to really kick off a fresh start.
If you're like so many of us out there, including myself, this year has been a little bit challenging, or at least 2023 has been.
I'm ready for a fresh start and I'm very, very excited for this, and I hope you are too.
One of my biggest loves which is probably why I love new years and new intentions so much is that I love getting together with my planners.
I am total Virgo and I love, love, love planning out everything and writing lists and just really looking ahead at what I'm doing.
I have two planners.
One is personal and it always comes first because it's priority number one and because it sets the tone for how I'm going to run my life and my business.
Then the second planner is for my business.
I'm telling you this because I've been having these conversations and there was a couple in some mom groups that moms were sharing that if they just pushed through, if they just tried harder, then they are going to be able to meet their goals.
If they just forced themselves to eat better or exercise or purge that closet and it's really painful to hear this it's a recipe for absolute disaster.
Do you hear the force behind those words?
Then I was in this business group and I was hearing the same thing, but in a different tone.
It was like the overwhelm never ends and there's just never enough time and the frustration.
We've got to hustle harder and I've just got to push through the exhaustion. If I'll just be successful enough, if I just hustle harder, if I just got one more client, and oh my gosh, the truth is, if you are pushing into the new year with that, you are 1,000% going to fail.
It isn't going to work and you're going to end up beating yourself up over it in the process.
It's going to reaffirm all those negative things that you already tell yourself.
I want to tell you how to do it because I've had so many people ask me.
We're working really hard in the pro membership right now, behind the scenes, to create and give an entire life and business rhythm system.
I'm basically giving everyone in the pro membership all the tools, downloads, systems and hacks I use to run my life.
My life is for kids on a 40-acre homestead while going to school full-time again and running a multi-six figure company.
It's really something to marvel at how it all comes together.
Even I feel this way about my own life, and nothing is so beautiful, then, like this well-orchestrated period of growth and excitement and also intertwining with rest and rejuvenation.
Legit, I'm teaching people how to manage laundry with six people, my cleaning schedule, my health regimen, my pantry stock, and how I shop and prep for food so that we never eat out, even when we're on the go, and how I manage my day-to-day schedule.
It all starts with planning out my new year right here. Even though all of that is the new system that we're creating in the pro membership, I really want to take some time to share this with you because I want you to set yourself up for success, for care, for rejuvenation in this period of time.
I don't care if you are just wanting to make it out of 2024 alive or running a marathon for the first time, or if you have ambitions to level up the business of your dreams.
I really want to walk you through in this episode how I set myself up for success.
How to Prioritize Your Personal Plans and Family Life
Okay, here's the thing. Two planners.
I start with my personal planner.
I am absolutely in love with cultivate what matters.
They have a beautiful, very-to-the-point planner. I've used this since 2019, and there used to be a little bit more fluff in the very beginning, but I feel like they have so streamlined it and it's absolutely incredible.
I use that as my go-to and I start looking at my life and it has these pages in the very beginning where you can evaluate your life and all of the things, and that's where I start.
Questions to Ask Yourself to Plan Your New Year
What was amazing?
What was really challenging?
What did I not like?
What did I love?
What were my lessons?
I seriously cannot move forward without this.
I even take some time in the journal itself has these areas where you can evaluate different parts of your life community, family, finances, health, your home, spiritual and personal growth, work, and learning and you just see what's missing.
What would it take to be completely satisfied in those areas, or content, or happy, or whatever it is that you want to be, and how can we make that happen?
There's also a section on what matters.
What are you wanting to say yes to, or what are you wanting to say no to? What does the best life look like for you? Then, when I'm all done with that, I really start getting a good idea of what I want to move forward with, what will serve me best.
I think a big part of that is because I like to look at the daily grind, what is happening in my big life.
Moments like the big things that are occurring in my life are important and wonderful, but it's the daily grind that messes us up.
Sometimes it's the day-to-day chopwood, carry water kind of things that bog us down. That's where I tend to spend a lot of my attention and that's where I actually clean so much energy in my life positive energy in my life.
In the postpartum years for me, my goals and really living my best life met goals like asking for more help, delegating housework, not folding most of my laundry, like what is seriously the point with that?
Lights out by 10 so that I can maximize my sleep.
Monthly date nights.
Reorganizing the pantry.
This is a huge goal of mine right now because I feel like when I'm looking at my day-to-day and I'm looking at the things that are just not working, one of my biggest frustrations is walking into my pantry and that feeling of ugh, and I noticed that in my day to day. Like that happens legit multiple times a day.
I have to walk into that pantry and that is not the feeling that I want to get and y'all, I don't have a Pinterest beautiful home.
I have a beautiful home, but it's not like the Pinterest-worthy kind of thing and you don't have to necessarily have that, but you do want to have something that feels good to you because that ugh moment takes up so much brain space, so much emotional and mental capacity.
It is an energy drainer.
Another thing that's really important to me is, like we have this art cabinet and that's what's in my dining room, so a lot of people use their cabinets to like put their fancy dishes and stuff in, and we don't have that.
We just have like a cabinet and it has a bunch of games in it for the family games.
And then my kids every single one of them and us we're just like very artsy people.
So we have art stuff it's the paper, it's the crayons, it's the paint you know all of the excess arty kind of things and it gets so overwhelming.
And so what can I do to really like organize that?
So every time I look over there I'm not gonna be freaking out or wondering like, oh, what is falling out of the cabinet or there's glue dripping, or like what rules do I need to put in place and how do I support my children in following those so that you know there isn't a glitter bomb, you know being launched into my dining room and that's the rest of my house.
Like how can we handle these basic necessities?
These are not massive goals, these are not running the marathon or doing the handstand or living 100%. You know like talks and free, like it doesn't feel big, massive and frustratingly so impossible. It's super basic.
It's not pretty, it's like not extravagant, it's the things that feel real, intangible, and these are my legit goals and they become my habits.
It's the little things like this that make life the day to day feel so much more doable and have more impact than getting that six-pack or some eight-phase facial regimen that you have to have every single morning and night to reduce all of your wrinkles.
I wanna talk about that for a second. Not the looking good part, because yes, but adding more things into your life.
We live too much right now, right. So much happening. We're inundated by everything, and the hardest part for me personally is all the options.
There's so many options, there's so many things to do in this life and they're all piling up.
When I sit down with my planner and if I didn't start with where am I in my life right now and what was the most challenging, I would be wanting to take on every new hobby.
I would want to take on so many different areas of what new can I grow in the gardens and what thing can I explore, and maybe I'll have some travel.
Things get really out of hand really really quickly, but when I focus on what it is that I need, like, the options become a lot less.
So many less options equal a better system, and I will tell you this is how I run my life. In general.
I am, you know, I tried to do this minimalistic kind of thing and it's a little bit different than that.
Like the decor, the hobbies, the mugs why are there so many mugs?
The toys, the clothes, all the body and face products these things greatly impact my wellbeing because I'm surrounded by it so much and it stresses me out, so I just don't do it anymore. I legit have one face product. That is it. That is all I have.
My morning routine takes me 10 minutes and that includes getting dressed and brushing my teeth in the morning. It takes me five minutes to clean my entire living room, and I call it modified minimalism, mainly because I'm a rule breaker and I don't like to follow minimalism for the principle, but because so many components do make my life easier.
So maybe before you start adding more into your life, look at what you need to subtract from your life instead so that you can make it easier.
How can you reduce the clutter and the stuff so it only takes you five to 10 minutes to clean your living room?
How can you get rid of that emotional and mental space that carries so much burden that you have every single day and free that up for yourself?
Okay, I realized that I'm off a tangent here and I don't mean to be overwhelming.
Obviously not the goal, but this is it.
This is why I'm creating this step-by-step life and system, business and rhythms system within the pro membership and giving you all the tools and the downloads and the hacks that I use to run my life, because it's such a huge component of how we live and how we do things and it's nice when it all comes together and you have space in your life and, my God, it's so good.
Integrating Running a Business Into Your Home and Family Life
And this is the space that I also use for my business, to create what I've created.
It comes from my home life and my personal life being in a decent place, not perfect, not always clean or organized or happy.
We all have our moments, but I know when I'm not in a good place in my home and in my daily rhythms and in my life, it's really hard for me to create the things that I do for you, to create postpartum university and to consistently run this.
And I see that with so many people that I work with in the pro membership as well, and they've got big ambitions and big goals.
And oftentimes they're doing those big things we are helping people really launch their business and be successful and nail clients and deeply support them in changing their lives not just for them but also for their clients that is huge stuff.
But so often it comes back to us and doing the work ourselves. It comes back to what can I do first to fuel myself so that I can therefore help others?
It's one of those key components that is so forgotten because oftentimes we are just in a rush to do, do, do, achieve all of the things or let's just get to the next level.
And how can we avoid this period, especially in postpartum?
If you're postpartum listening to this and maybe you don't have a business, but you have this yearning to just be done with postpartum, how can we really nourish and enjoy and just settle into this phase of, whatever phase it is in our life?
For me, my personal life and my family are priority number one, and when I nail that, I at least get it into a good flow.
Then comes my business, then comes my big ambitions, then comes my hobbies and the things that I love and enjoy.
It has to fit into my business, has to fit into my personal life.
For example, I have a 10-year wedding anniversary coming up.
My husband and I will be celebrating this July and I'm so incredibly excited. We've been planning this for a while.
My husband and I have never had we had a one-day honeymoon. That was it. He ended up. He was going off to MIT for his graduate programs.
We got married and then he ended up having to leave. It was only for a week and then he came back because he did their online program, but it was a lot.
It was a rush. Then with life with kids, we have legit never been away from our children.
We've never been on an airplane without our kids. We've never been more than two nights away from our kids.
We've done little local things where we are able to scoot out for a bit, but we've never had travel time together or a honeymoon or anything.
Long story short, we are planning a trip out of the country. My work has to plan around that, but it's not just like.
This is a big deal to have a beautiful 10-year wedding anniversary to celebrate. I'm so grateful, but it's also the little things too.
One thing that's really important for me is getting back into this movement, and not necessarily practicing weightlifting, which I've done in the past, or yoga we're kickboxing I was really active in that for some time but to really just get back into just this daily movement.
That has been my number one priority moving into 2024.
If that being my number one priority means that that's what's taking up my morning space, now I can't come back to my business and be like well, I also plan on writing this new book.
That's going to have to take time in the morning. No, that goes in the back burner, or at least it goes in a different space, because right now my number one is my body and my personal life.
Then my business comes after.
This is how I do it, y'all the same with my business.
Once I have my personal life set out, then I look at my business and I do the same thing.
I ask the same questions what's really amazing for me? What's really challenging here? What did I do not like
All the things and evaluate the different areas of my business.
Then look at okay, where do I want to make improvements?
How can those fit in with my life?
I'm going to sum this up because I know I've been chatting a lot.
Really, really, I'm going to encourage you to stop focusing on the big, massive goals and really focus on those everyday challenges and how we can make those easier for ourselves.
Maybe it's not folding the laundry and just throwing it in the drawers.
Maybe it's making sure that your kids are the ones taking care of it, doing their own laundry.
I have my four-year-old who folds and puts away her laundry. She is folding them now only because she's watching her siblings do it.
There are periods of time where she's like I really don't want to do this and I'm like I don't care, just put it in your drawers. As long as they go in your drawers, I'm good. That's my bare minimum.
They're washed and in your drawers Great.
Sometimes it's doing the dishes twice. A lot of times for me it's declutter.
I have four kids and so there's always this like where do these things come from? Like where did this appear?
I don't remember this ever being a part of my home. It's crazy how that works.
But making sure that I'm constantly purging and getting rid of stuff or minimizing to where cleaning is just super easy for me and doesn't take up so much space in my day or brain space in my day.
Look at the day-to-day and then plan your year by looking back at where you came from, where you are now, assessing everything and then evaluating what matters most. What do you need to get rid of to bring in more joy?
It's not just stuff and things. It's the relationships, hobbies, reoccurring events, things that you're signed up to do that you don't want to do anymore.
Then brainstorm those goals and create actionable tasks that go with it and break it down.
That's my second planner is I sit down and I plan out my year and then I break it into quarters.
That's what I use specifically for my business, but it's also a part of the Cultivate What Matters Journal.
It's already broken down in quarters, which is so beautiful. I do the same in my business.
In my business, I call them 90-day sprints.
We focus on one area where we're going to improve or we're just going to blow it out of the water.
We give everything to it in a 90-day period and just watch it emerge.
One of the examples that I have one of the goals is to get our podcast to the top 5 percent right now or the top 15 percent in the world.
To be in the top five and be the best podcast out there requires some serious goals.
What are we going to do? I will tell you. We're investigating what that means because we don't know what it means.
Maybe that's part of the plan too.
Our 90-day strategy is like what does it take to get to be one of the top 5 percent of the podcast, the best podcast in the world? What does it take to do that?
Your reviews are super important, so please help us with that. I'm just throwing it out there.
Also throwing it out there consider minimalism or a version of that to really support you in your life.
All of the things so much more to share.
But in the end, I hope this is so, so helpful for you.
Send me an email. I really want to know what your goals are for this.
Let's chat, let's connect in on that and until then, I am so excited for what I am bringing to you on this podcast and in business and postpartum in general, and I'm very excited to share that all with you coming up soon.
I am so grateful you turned into the Postpartum University podcast. We hope you enjoyed this episode enough to leave us a quick review and, more importantly, I hope more than ever that you take what you've learned here, apply it to your own life, and consider joining us in the Postpartum University membership. It's a private space where mothers and providers learn the real truth and the real tools needed to heal in the years to come and the real tools needed to heal in the years Postpartum. You can learn more at www.postpartumu. That's the letter U.com. We'll see you next week.
