80. How to Thrive in 2026 Without Burning Out (Part 3): Staying in Your Race for the Long Haul

As we wrap up our three-part series on starting the new year with clarity and purpose, this episode focuses on one essential question: How do we stay in our race when the excitement fades and the work gets hard?

We explore why we often expect quick results in the beginning but underestimate what steady faithfulness can produce over time. Through personal stories, practical analogies, and biblical wisdom, this conversation invites you to trade the racehorse mentality of burnout and comparison for the pack horse rhythm of balance, perseverance, and long obedience.

We talk about learning to be bad before becoming good, how discipline shapes both character and calling, and why progress is still happening even when you can’t see it yet. You’ll be encouraged to evaluate what you’re carrying, quiet the noise of comparison and distraction, and live with the wisdom that your days are numbered.

This episode will help you refocus on what truly matters, recommit to the priorities you set at the beginning of the year, and walk forward with confidence, consistency, and peace.

Breathing Room by Andy Stanley: 

https://series.northpointministries.org/breathing-room

Reflection Questions:

• Am I running like a racehorse or walking like a pack horse?
• What noise do I need to quiet so I can stay focused on my race?
• What am I carrying that God never asked me to carry?
• What does balance look like to me in this season of life?
• Where do I need to trust that God is still working—even when I don’t see evidence yet?
• How can I measure faithfulness instead of perfection?
• Am I living with the wisdom that my days are numbered—and do my actions reflect that?

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Transcript

Series Recap And Today’s Focus

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Hey friends, I'm Nikki Smith, your host here at A Heart That Beats for Home, the podcast where we're ditching filters and diving headfirst into the raw beauty of all things home. Now, I am no expert when it comes to this whole parenting and marriage dance. I'm simply a gal who's been riding the mom roller coaster for 22 years and a wife still untangling the mystery of it all 25 years after saying I do. My goal is to bring you unapologetically messy and boldly genuine conversations about cultivating strong families. We're gonna laugh, possibly cry, and straight talk about the joy and chaos that comes within the four walls that we call home. No judgment and certainly no perfection. Just real talk from my heart, a heart that beats for home. Let's dive in. Hello, friends. Welcome back to another week. Thanks for being here with us for part three of a three-part series. We are wrapping up today in the series that we kicked off season three with, all about coming into a new year, setting goals, getting clarity. And then today we're going to be talking about staying in your race. So the first week when we came back, we talked a lot about running your own race and making it about what really matters to you, not looking to the left and the right to see what everybody else is doing, but just committing to your race, really thinking through why we set certain goals that we set in the new year, maybe why we shy away from setting new goals, if that scares us, if it intimidates us, if we just feel like it sets us up for failure. We talked about some statistics there about Quitter's Day and how most people statistically do walk away from those new goals and fall back into bad habits. We talked about the power of potentially this year, instead of setting a bunch of new goals, if you're struggling with that, maybe picking one bad habit that you're going to eliminate, your worst habit that you're going to eliminate out of your life and see how that starts to impact your life for the positive. Then last week we talked about clarity and really honing in on long-term vision for your life, for your family, for your future, based on some of the main pillars that you are responsible for in your life. I shared last week that the four pillars in my life are I am the only person that can be my husband's wife. I am the only one who is the parent to my children. I am the only one who can take care of myself spiritually, physically, mentally, emotionally. And I am the only one that can do the jobs that I have been set out to do in running my business. And that those are the core things that I need to build my long-term vision around. Obviously, keeping my hands wide open to the Lord to come in and change and

Running Your Race vs Comparison

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shake up plans and trusting him with the overall long-term vision of that, but just getting really clear. So if you have not listened to part one and part two, I encourage you to go back and get caught up on those before finishing this episode. Today we're going to dig in on staying in your race, staying in and committing to the things that once you've gone through the steps that we've talked about in the last couple of weeks and you've really looked at what you're working for and you've gotten clarity and it aligns with your long-term vision, how do we then stay in the race? How do the things that we have determined are priorities or should be priorities and our day, our hours, our activities should match those priorities? How do we not fall back into some of the bad habits or patterns or overscheduling? All of the different things that can ultimately pull us away from the things that we have seen and we have looked at and we have determined are the most important things that we should be focusing on. And yet somehow we still can wander away from those things. And years can go by and we look back and we think, man, I've been talking about this same thing that should be a priority. Maybe it's for a decade, maybe it's for a couple of years. So how do we now coming into almost we're almost of February? So we have almost completed a full chapter of 2026. It's crazy to think that we are already turning the page on a calendar and one twelfth of this new beginning, if you will, is going to be behind us and we're walking into another chapter. So today just want to really focus in on how do we stay in our race? How do we stay committed to the things that we know are important for us and our families to be moving in the direction that we feel God is calling us towards? And one thing that I know to be true in my life, and I see it all around us, I feel more and more I am seeing this with technology and just the need for instant gratification, the instant information, the instant knowledge, the instant access to so much stuff, is that as a society, we very often expect way too much in the beginning of something. And then we wildly underestimate what discipline and perseverance can do over time. As a society, as an individual, I truly see this pattern of us wanting instant results, but true results, lasting results, come through steady faithfulness. And so that's what we're gonna talk

Expecting Too Much Upfront

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about today. Going to use a couple of analogies that have been shared with me over the years that have been super helpful, that kind of are things that come back to me, gonna give you some good resources to be able to dig into on your own after this podcast is over, some more deep diving if that's what you choose to do. And also just some reflection questions for you to just ponder, think on, maybe take some time and journal about at the end of this episode to close up this three-week series. So excited just to dive in, share some personal stories with you that have been brought to my mind this week as I've been preparing. And then, like I said, some of those analogies that have been shared with me through some mentorship in business specifically, but I think apply to every aspect of life. First of all, let's talk about this whole expecting too much upfront and not enough long term. There is, like I said, this need for instant gratification and something that I was told early on in my business, I was really struggling with doing something over and feeling like I just want to be really good at it. And I'm frustrated that I don't feel like I am. And somebody shared with me this concept of Nikki, when you start something, you have to be willing to do it and be bad at it. You have to be willing to start and be bad. And then once you've been bad for a little bit and you've kept showing up, bad becomes you're actually getting good at it. And as you show up and you're good at it, you do it over and over again, eventually, with repetition and practice, you turn around and you realize, oh, I'm actually pretty great at this. I'm really starting to master this. And what I used to be bad at, I kept doing and then I got good. And now I'm really great at this. And ultimately, over time, over hundreds, if not thousands of times of repeating the same actions, we become excellent. But we live in a society that we don't like to do the hard of bad and good. We want to decide to start something and we want to, in a day, two days, a week, a month, be great or excellent at it. And when we look at people around us or in our lives or on the TV that are excellent at something, if you were to sit down with them and ask, how many hours, how many years, how many decades have you disciplined yourself to show up over and over and do the same mundane task over and over? If it's an athlete, how many times have you walked into a gym and put your muscles to a test and maxed them out day after day after day? If it's a chef that you're watching on television and you're frustrated with the fact that you struggle to put things together in the kitchen that tastes good for your family, but yet this chef has shown up for day after day, hour after hour, has traveled, has tried different things, has practiced their craft over and over for years and decades to be excellent. We see this when we look at fitness people on the internet and we're frustrated that we're not getting the same results, but we're comparing our just starting and maybe being bad or good at it to their excellent at it because they have been practicing this for a long time. And I think when we accept the fact that there are things in our life that we desperately want to change, patterns that we want to change, new habits, new directions, things that we know we have to implement in our lives to be able to get to this long-term vision and being able to see a future for ourselves that makes us say, that would be really amazing if in 10, 15, 20, 30 years the things that I can picture for my future were reality. But we're gonna have to agree to be really uncomfortable and often bad at some of the steps that we need to take to get there. I think this practice applies too as we're building character. There are things that we recognize. I've shared over the past handful of episodes about one of my true desires is to really be a person of joy, that no matter what the circumstances are around me, no matter how chaotic the schedule gets, how chaotic the house gets, no matter what things are thrown our way, what schedules get turned upside down, what car breaks down, no matter what things happen around us, that I can become a person that is just joyful, that I just have that as a character quality. Doesn't mean that I don't ever have a bad day. It doesn't mean that I don't at times lose my temper or have to get back in line. But if the overflow of my life is joy, I am going to have to practice and discipline and in full transparency have really bad days at trying to be joyful. I can look at days where I'm like, you nailed it and you did a really good job. And then there can be days where I really was bad at being joyful. But the difference is I'm recognizing patterns, habits, disciplines that are distracting me from that true stance of joy that I desire in my life. And so I'm working at it. I'm working to have less and less bad days so that pretty soon I could say I'm doing pretty good at it. And maybe occasionally there might be a bad day in there to hopefully in 10 years from now that people look at me and they think that girl, when I think about Nikki, I just think about joy and she just radiates the love of Jesus and the joy of Jesus and gratitude for being alive and having people

Bad, Good, Great, Excellent Framework

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around her and having shelter and food and water. But it's going to take practice day after day, choosing to show up, being bad, getting good at it, then hopefully being great, and then ultimately excellent. Part of this is that process of sanctification as we're working towards becoming all of those things and the fruits of the spirits, becoming more and more like Christ. Two specific things that came to mind this week as I was prepping for this episode in my own life were such great examples about how we expect too much up front and not enough long term. And also this bad, good, great, excellent concept. I've shared very openly here on the podcast that for about 20 months now, I have been on quite the health and wellness journey. I got the team around me that I needed to be successful, the natural path, the hormone specialist, just getting the right people to come alongside. Part of it is because I'm in a season of life where I do have just a different availability in my schedule that I didn't have when I had three tiny kids. Now I've got children that are older. I'm able to focus a little bit more on myself, put more time in at the gym and on the prepping and the food. And also because I came into menopause and it was wreaking havoc on my body. And it's something that I was super passionate about addressing, not only for myself, but so it's a voice and hopefully a platform as I continue to learn and figure it out, that I'll be able to share more and more here on the podcast and bring amazing people that I'm learning from on to help in this season of life. But having the extra time and coming into this season of womanhood, being in menopause, it had to be a priority for me to start putting my health on the forefront for the sake of myself, for the sake of my family, for the longevity that I want and my family wants for me to have, not only as their mom and wife, but it's hopefully in the years to come as a grandma and to be able to be fit and active. And so I've been on this 20-month journey. When I started, I every single week I was seeing great results. And for the first eight months, every single week, I was seeing positive results when I would get on the scale, when I would take the measurements. And that alone is so motivating when you're getting in a new routine. When you have these goals and these ambitions and you're getting results from the work you're doing, it's very easy. I shouldn't say very easy. It's much easier to stay committed to the process because you're seeing results. But at about eight months, I really stalled out. Things slowed down by that point. I think I had lost about 35 pounds. I was feeling so much better. And really for the last year, last 11, 12 months, it has been very slow going. Maybe lost 10, 12 pounds in the last year, have continued to do the things that I know I need to focus on, the hormones, the high protein, the getting my steps in, all of these different things that I know I'm supposed to be doing. I have stayed consistent. Of course, there's been times where I've missed, but overall, for the course of the year, I've stayed very consistent in that. And I had taken an initial starting picture on day one. And then I took a progress picture at that eight-month mark when I had lost 35 pounds. And when I put those side by side, you could clearly see that there was a substantial difference. Anytime that you lose weight like that, you're going to see a pretty big difference. And it was great. And I felt good. But this last year I had just been a little discouraged. And so decided in January that one of the things that was going to need to be a priority for me in my life was I needed to hire somebody to work with me specifically on strength training because I've known since the day I started 20 months ago that strength really needed to be a priority for me. And yet every time I walk out to our home gym that's beautiful and it has tons of equipment, I just get overwhelmed and I feel, again, like what we were talking about, I feel like I'm really bad at this. And so when you're bad at something and you're doing it alone, it's not something you want to show up for every day. And so I have not been disciplined in lifting heavy weight the way that I know through my research and this, the people that I have around me that are pouring into me and guiding me, that has to be a priority for this stage of life for longevity, building muscles specifically in your 40s, 50s, 60s is crucial. And so I made the decision in the beginning of January that I was going to invest and hire somebody to walk that journey with me at least for a season, as I was bad and then I tried to get better and then hopefully can get great to then down the road, years after practicing over and over, I can be excellent. And I won't need somebody to hold my hand or watch my form or tweak things that I'm not doing right or adjust the weights that I'm lifting or teach me new moves because I will have done it over and over. And so that was an investment I made. And so in the beginning of January, I had a conversation with the gal that I chose to go with and was giving her an a synopsis of my whole life health journey, but really catching her up on just the last 20 months of what it has looked like for me, the things that I'm doing, the things that are working. And I expressed to her that about a year ago, I feel like I stalled out. I had great success. I stalled out and I said, I have a picture of the day I started and my eight months in, but I haven't taken another picture because she was asking about before and after pictures. I said, I haven't taken a picture for the last year because really nothing has really happened. Sure, there's been those 10 pounds, but it doesn't feel like anything has really adjusted. And so she encouraged me.

Health Journey: Early Wins And Stall

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She said, Nikki, please consider taking, taking this picture. And through that conversation, I was like, you know what? I probably should. It's been 12 months. So the next morning I got up, I put the exact same clothes on from picture one and picture two, so that picture three would have the exact same clothes on. Took the pictures in the mirror, didn't think anything of it. And then literally had this moment of holy cow, like literally stunned when I put those pictures into my app that lines them up perfectly in a collage. And I saw day one, eight months, and 20 months. Because what I saw in that picture was that there was more difference in my body from eight months to today than there was in that process of time, that first eight months, where I felt like I made so much more progress than the second part of the journey. And it was such a good reminder, such an eye-opener to me that sometimes we use metrics to measure things that aren't accurate. Sometimes we underestimate that staying with something and being consistent in what we know we're supposed to be doing is actually working, even if we don't think we're seeing the results that we want, even if somebody else is saying we should be doing it differently or we're going too slow. And just to see that with my own eyes, to be more impressed with picture two to picture three, when I really would have put money on the fact that would not be what my results would be, to see it with my own eyes was such a beautiful reminder to me that sometimes we just have to keep doing the right thing that we know we're supposed to be doing, even when we don't feel like we're getting the results. I can equate this to the Bible in the year as well. There were so many times this last year when I was reading the Bible and there were days where I felt frustrated and I felt like I've been in the Old Testament for so long. So much of this is so hard for me to comprehend. I'm asking God to show me in this what I'm supposed to be learning. There were days when it just felt like I don't even know what I can take away from this, but I knew that I was called to stay consistent with it. And it was over the 365 days of completing reading the Bible and seeing the whole picture of the Old Testament and the New Testament, and admittedly still not understanding large sections of it, like large sections of it. But again, a reminder that I have to do that practice over and over again to get to the point that I am really great at understanding the scriptures all the way through. But I can trust that in the process that there are going to be things, and there are, I could write a hundred different things that I learned throughout the last year of reading the Bible, that if I would have just decided not to keep doing it on the hard days or the bad days or the confusing reading days, I would have missed out on such a beautiful compound that came with just staying and being obedient. And then the other thing that came to mind this week, another, there's so many analogies that we can pull from health and strength training, just about life in general. But after meeting with this gal and deciding that she was the one that was going to be the right fit to help me in this season of taking weightlifting seriously, I got my first plan for that first Monday. And I went out to the gym and I was excited, overwhelmed, a little bit scared. And day one went pretty good. It was upper body. I did pretty good. Wednesday went out for the second one, and it was leg day. And I will tell you that about halfway through, there might have been tears welling up in my eyes. I was so exhausted. I felt like my legs were two cement blocks. I didn't know that I could even tell them how to lift anymore. I didn't know if I'd be able to walk inside or go up the two steps from the garage into the house. And you all know that the next day and two days later, I looked like a beat-up woman coming down the stairs sideways. I was joking with my family that I might have to sit and bump down my way because my legs were so sore and so disconnected from the rest of my body because they had been so overworked. And it felt overwhelming. But I knew that I had to just keep going. And this is again where it's really important that if there's something that's a struggle to have the right people around you to encourage you. Of course, my sweet friend was encouraging me and telling me this is a starting place. Is letting us know where you're at. But now I can say only three full weeks into the program to be doing those same workouts. But the things that seemed impossible to do, even with just body weight, because my body was in such shock about what I was doing to it. Now, three weeks later, I'm able to not just do with body weight, but do holding massive amounts of weights in my hands, something as little as a calf raise that three weeks ago, which was so discouraging, felt super hard at the end of this workout because my legs felt like they weren't going to work. And I simply had on a 12-pound weighted vest with no weights in my hand. And it was difficult to do in that moment. Now, three weeks later, to be able to do that without any real pain and to be able to hold 50 pounds between my two weights in my hands just to see that progress of sticking with it when it was hard and I was bad at it. And I'm still, I would say I'm still in the bad to good category, but it's gonna take time, right? It's gonna take time for me to grow in confidence, to not have to look at the video every single time, to not be frustrated that my form fails off or that I'm not engaging my core. And this is just the process that we have to go through. And this is the point in the year, a month in, where we have to ask ourselves: are we going to continue with the things that we decided were important enough on January 1st or 5th, or whenever you decided to write down those goals for the year, the things that were important enough then, are they still important enough now to keep showing up for them even when you feel like you're bad at it? Even when, as much as you want to roll right out of bed in the morning, and you had said, I'm never gonna hit the alarm snooze button, I'm just gonna jump out of bed. And yet you still struggle to hit the snooze button. But maybe when you used to hit it three times, now you're hitting it twice, or you're hitting it once, or maybe a couple of days you're jumping out of bed and you're not hitting it all. Are you willing to stay in with the things that you committed to? Because maybe right now you're not seeing the results that you want, or the results are slow, but are you willing to commit to, man, if in a year, three years, 10 years, 20 years, these are the results that I could have with staying consistent. Are you willing to stick with it? Another comparison that I want to give to you guys that was so impactful for me. Another time it was in business that I had this conversation with a mentor. A lot of my life lessons have come through being a business owner and having to persevere through a lot of ups and downs and just a lot of different

Strength Training And Coaching Help

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seasons of business, watching people come in way after you've started and go way faster and trying to reconcile that in your brain, just navigating ups and downs of business in general. But I had a mentor that once told me, she said, Nikki, I know that it's super frustrating when you see some of the things that you've been doing forever and maybe not getting the results that you want. And somebody else comes in and they do what seems to be the same thing, but they go so fast. She said, Every time I think about you and business, I think about a pack horse. You are just this steady, eddy pack horse. But the other kind of horses that are on the race sometimes is the flashy race horses. And we see them and they're shiny and they're fancy and they go flying by us. And we are maybe frustrated by that because here we are, we're this pack horse that's just walking step by step. And the results in the moment feel slow. Maybe you can think about something in your life right now that you're like, man, I have been consistently committed to this fill in the blank, whatever it might be. And it just feels like I am making no progress, but I'm just taking these small steps over and over. And yet I see people to the left and the right of me that make the same decisions or have a similar goal. And they just they jump on the racehorse and they just fly to the finish mark. And it's so frustrating. And the difference between a pack horse and a racehorse is so significant, but we don't really take the time because we look at them as two totally separate entities. But yet in life, when we're on a trail as a pack horse, we tend to look at the racehorse and question why our journey looks different. Well, the reality is because the journeys are completely different. You use different horses for different things. And a pack horse is known for being able to go as much as 25 miles in a day. They are trained specifically to be able to overcome distraction of horses walking ahead of them that are kicking and maybe out of line, distraction by not going off of the trail. They are trained to be steady and to overcome these obstacles and distractions. And like I said, they can go 25 miles in a day. They can carry an extremely heavy load. A pack horse can carry 30% of its body weight key when it's distributed accurately. An unbalanced load on a pack horse totally halts the mission because it makes it impossible for the horse to move in the way that it needs to move. And so the people that are taking these pack horses, whether they're going into the mountains, they're taking in supplies, whatever they're doing, they are spending so much time and precision balancing the load of the pack horse. So if you have a thousand-pound horse, it can carry 300 pounds on its on its body up the hill through the mountains for 25 miles, but the weight needs to be precisely balanced so that it can make that journey. And you're gonna see here, there's a lot of analogies that we can make to these different kinds of horses and how it applies to real life. So then let's look at the racehorse. A racehorse is able to go where the pack horse was able to go 25 miles in a day. A racehorse is trained to go between one and one and a half miles, but in a sprint, all out, fast feeds, upwards of 40 to 45 miles per hour, in what I was researching. They can go fast, but for a very short distance. They also are instead of being trained to overcome distraction, they're being trained to put on blinders and have a very narrow focus. They're not able to have a lot of other things happening around them. It's a very narrow focus to get right to the finish line. They're looking straight at the finish line. Whereas, again, the pack horse has been trained to overcome a ton of distraction ahead of them, around them, behind them, besides them. They also can only carry a light load. The goal of a racehorse is that it doesn't have any more than 10% of its body weight that it's carrying. So where the pack horse could carry 30%, a racehorse is looking to carry no more than 110 to 130 pounds of gear and rider, right? That's why we see all those tiny little, tiny little humans riding those racehorses because they need a light load, because you cannot carry a heavy load and go super fast and go super far. They on average will run a one to two mile race. And then after that race, they need tons of rest to recover to go only that short distance again, but at a super fast speed in a week or two weeks' time. And so when we look at these two different kinds of horses, we have the pack horse and we have the race horse. I truly believe that so often we come into a new year with a racehorse mentality. We want to go super fast. We want to see quick results. We put blinders on, but the blinders create narrow focus, which is why I think about two weeks in, we talked about that quitter's day, that second Friday of every January where people are leaving. I think it's because when you can only carry a light load because you're so narrowly focused on a single goal, running super fast, wanting quick results,

Slow Progress Revealed By Photos

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you burn out and you become that racehorse who has gone the one to two miles super, super fast, but now needs tons of rest because of total burnout, because they can't go any farther because they've left no breathing room. There's no more energy. There's nothing left in the tank to be able to do it again and again. And as we come into February, as we're wrapping up January and the stories that I've shared with you about my own health journey, it makes me realize the power in the non-sexy, not shiny, not sparkling in everybody staring at, but the pack horse, the pack horse who just one step in front of the other can go 12 times the distance that a racehorse can go in one day alone. They're trained to do it over and over, day after day, because it's steady. The weight is balanced. This plays so much into our lives when we try to take on way too much and we wonder why things are falling apart. Because I've said it before in my life, I feel like there's times where I'm rocking and rolling in one area. And I'm like, I have got this certain area of my life totally pulled together. I feel like all cylinders are firing on how I'm parenting and how I'm managing my home and the laundry's done and the kitchen's clean and I'm cooking all these good meals. And when I feel like I'm rocking and rolling there, maybe I have totally dropped the ball in business. And I feel like home stuff is going great, but I've dropped the ball over here. So then we switch gears and we go, okay, I'm gonna work really hard on my business. And now my house is falling apart. I'm not showing up to kids things I'm remembering or I'm forgetting things. We aren't eating any healthy meals because we're running through drive-throughs. And it feels like it's this back and forth and just this power of the analogy of the pack horse that is going long distance without burnout, that is trained to overcome distractions. And when it's balanced, when it and balance is a tricky thing. Do I believe in balance? I do, but I think we train ourselves to think that balance means I spend the same amount of time on all of the important things. And that is not balance. To me, balance means that in those four pillars that we talked about in the previous weeks, those four different pillars that are my key responsibilities. You have to find out what those key responsibilities are for you. They're the things that hold the most value. Balance to me is every single day, those four things are paid attention to. But it doesn't mean that if I worked seven hours at my business, that I had to spend seven hours with my husband and kids to have a balanced life. No, it doesn't. Balance to me, and what I've had to learn over the years is balance to me is that every day when I lay my head on the pillow, I can say I made more deposits than withdrawals when it came to how I showed up for my kids, how I showed up for my spouse, how I showed up in my health and my whether it's spiritual, mental, physical, and how I showed up in my business. There were more deposits into those pillars than withdrawals. And if that means that I spent 10 minutes with each of my children face to face, or I spent time with one of them sitting and doing homework and laughing or looking through stuff together, maybe one helped me in the kitchen and we had a great conversation, or I had a phone call with one who needed a little extra mom time. Maybe I brought something special to somebody at work, or I wrote a note to put in their room and I made sure to text my husband to let him know how much I appreciate how hard he works for our family and the beautiful life that he's allowed us to live because of his dedication and his grit to get up and selflessly serve us day after day. And it's following up on some of those work emails and it's getting into the gym. Those all take different amounts of time, but the investment that's being made is a deposit, not a withdrawal. And where we start to get withdrawals is where we say, I need to spend so much

Bible In A Year And Consistency

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time on this. Maybe for you it's a job, or maybe you've become obsessed with your nutrition. And so many hours of your day are spent at the gym and cooking and just so singly focused. And those are good habits to have. But when they start to be a constant deposit to your health and nutrition, but they have so overwhelmed your schedule that the withdrawals that they're taking because you can't pay attention to your family, or you're not sitting and eating with them because it's not the right foods, or you need to go to the gym. And so you're not sitting and connecting with your family. It's how are you gonna look at this holistically? All of these pillars that are priorities, and this is where getting rid of things that are not yours to carry are so important. I also wanna recognize that there are going to be seasons of things that come into life. There are going to be illness, there are going to be short sprints where we have to have a little bit more blinders on and focused for things that in our family we have agreed to that we're gonna run for. And I think that's a key point. I think when there are seasons in our life that we need to be a little unbalanced. For me, there have been probably three or four times over the last 20 years in my business where I knew if we are going for this specific goal, if we are going for this promotion, if we are going for this incentive or this bonus, it is going to take a little bit of blinders on focus from me, which is going to impact my family. It has been a commitment for us in those times. Same thing for my husband, if he's involved in something or a kid that's involved in something, where we come together as a family and we say, hey, this is what this looks like. And this is the amount of time that it's going to take for the next, what is it? Is it four weeks? Is it eight weeks? I feel like a whole lot more than that is dangerous if you're neglecting other important pillars in your life. But coming together and saying, in this next eight weeks, this is what it's gonna take for mom to really run for this. And it's gonna mean that I'm gonna not be able to show up in the same way in cooking the meals or keeping the house clean or keeping the laundry going. Can I count on you guys to be behind me on this? Whether that means you're gonna step in and you're gonna help, whether it means you're gonna give grace and you're just gonna, you know, you're not gonna complain and focus on it. You're gonna make your own peanut butter and jelly, you're gonna throw your own laundry in. Can you be with me on this for this short period of time? So of course there's gonna be that. You're gonna have postpartum times, you're gonna have, like I said, illness. But overall, in the normal day-to-day, how are we finding balance? And what does that look like? And when we get that balance, like the pack horse, we can go a long distance without burning out, a long distance, carrying a pretty heavy load, but that doesn't feel like we're falling over or we're dropping all of the balls that we have in the air because we've balanced it, that we can sustain it for a long journey. And so I just love this analogy of the pack horse and the racehorse and the differences and really being able to self-examine how am I operating in my life when I try to make changes or how I'm being forced to show up in my day because of circumstances that I've put myself into. One of the resources that I want to share with you, and I will be sure to put this in the show notes because I think it is so important. I came across this sermon series called Breathing Room. It's a four-part series by Pastor Andy Stanley. It's probably, I bet it's 15 years old, the series, at least 10, maybe 15. This one is one that I listen to every couple of years because it's just that good and so much wisdom in it. But the whole thing is titled Breathing Room and it talks about the importance of having breathing room in our life. And it is in three specific areas. The first episode that I'll tag is he's just setting up what is breathing room, why is it important? How is it biblical to have margin in the different areas of our life that he digs into? The first one is in our time. How is it biblical and why is it so important to have this breathing room in our time? The second one is in our finances. So much that you can say about having breathing room when it comes to our finances. The third one is in our relationships. So our relationships with our children, our marriages, our friendships. How is it important to have breathing room when it comes to those relationships? And I've just started listening to it again. I'm on the third episode. And it is just, it is so good. It is so challenging, it's so refreshing, it's so clarifying, if you will, because it helps you understand why sometimes we don't, we just feel like we can't make forward progress. And it's because we have created a life in which we have absolutely zero breathing room. And when we live like that, and I'm sure some of you listening can

Three Weeks Of Legs: From Tears To Load

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already recognize patterns. Maybe it's in the way that your kids' schedule is, maybe your kids are in so much stuff, and it just is impossible to find peace and balance in your life because of that. Maybe it's that you've extended yourself so far in your finances that you just every single day, the anxiety and the overwhelm still the joy, and it doesn't allow you to make any progress because the weight is so unbalanced when it comes to how tight your finances are. And maybe it's in your relationships. But whatever it is, this series is just so good at bringing some clarity, bringing some encouragement, bringing some practical steps into focus that we can do to create more breathing room. And in the episode that I just finished listening to, it was the one on our time, on our schedule. And at the end of this of the message, and again, I just encourage you to go listen to it because he so beautifully explains all of this better, way better than I can. Because again, he's in the excellent category of communicating. He's been doing this forever. He's in the excellent category of being able to understand scripture because he's spent hours and years in the word. But he talks about Psalms 90. And Psalms 90 is a chapter from Moses as he was coming out of wandering the wilderness for 40 years, and he had seen so much suffering and so much disobedience and just so much happening. In Psalms 90, verse 4, he says, For a thousand years in your sight are but as yesterday when it has passed, or as a watch in the night. And basically, what's that saying is a thousand years is but a blink for the Lord. A thousand years is but the snap of a fingers, or like a watch in the night, which would be a short period of time that somebody is watching in night. So a thousand years that we're living, which we're never gonna live a thousand years, we'd be lucky to get 80, 90, is like yesterday for the Lord, or it's like that small watch in the night. And so when you think about that perspective of what feels for us like we have so much time. We've got all of this time, we've got decades and decades to get this stuff figured out, or I'll get my priorities straight in when the kids are older, or I'll get my finances figured out once we're 40 and we don't have the kids at home, or I'll get my relations figured out once the kids are gone and we can just focus in on us. We all know how that plays out when we continue to not do it now. But this is saying, what we think is this life that is so long is but a snap of the finger for the Lord. And then later in that chapter in Psalms 90, verse 12, he says, Teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. And when he was digging into this, yesterday I had this like epiphany and actually spurred on a couple of things that I wrote down to talk to my husband about immediately. We're going away for a long weekend in a couple of weeks, and so I have a list of things that I really want us to connect on and talk on. And I just thought when we pray that, teach us, Lord, to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. What that to me means, and in listening to the series and reading that Psalms 90 and understanding where Moses was coming from when he's writing this is when we truly understand, when the Lord has taught us to number our days, to understand that our days are so few, they are so limited. And we assume we're gonna get 80 years, but we have no idea in that small blimp of time how many. Years we're guaranteed with our children. Absolutely no guarantee. We have no guarantee how much time we're going to get with our spouse, who we've decided that relationship we can mend in 10 years. Right now we're just plugging through. It's survival mode. We just got to get the kids through stuff. We'll reconnect later. We are not guaranteed. And I know this so well because my husband has suffered massive medical things. And yet in the moment, you're reminded of just how fragile life is, but how quickly life creeps back in to get you back into old patterns and naivety of believing we have got so much time. And friends, we are not guaranteed. And so if we knew, if we truly comprehended how limited our days are, the time with our kids, the time with our family, the time with our parents, the times that we have to really make things matter, the next part of that verse says, teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom. Because do you not think that if we really stopped every day and thought, today, Lord, help me to know that this day is numbered, that my days overall are numbered. And the choices I make today, may they only reflect a heart of wisdom that understands that. Because a heart of wisdom that understands that my days are limited all of a sudden is working with intense purpose, with humility, with focus on things that matter. Because so often we have to ask ourselves, I would encourage all of you to ask yourselves. I'm asking myself, Nikki, what are you chasing? What is it? And is it, whatever it is worth it? If at the end of my life I say, I got that. Is it the career? Is it the accolades? Is it the money? Is it the, I don't know, what are you chasing? What does your calendar and your day to day reflect that you are chasing after? And is it showing that you are having a heart of wisdom because that's where you're inputting your time? I know when I look at my time right now, there are things in my life that are not reflecting a heart of wisdom that is truly comprehending how limited and how numbered

Pack Horse vs Racehorse Analogy

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my days are. Because if it did, I would never need to pick up my phone to scroll the internet to see what other people were doing or what other people thought or what other people were promoting that I should be doing. I would be so focused on what the Lord has given me right in front of me in my home, for my family, for my husband, for my life, for my physical well-being, emotional well-being, showing up for things that truly have lasting impact, that when I get to my deathbed. And in this series, he talks about a woman who worked in hospice and asked her, all of her patients in their last 12 weeks when she was with them what their biggest regrets in life were. And the top two things that she got from every single man. She said, the men, all the same. I wish I wouldn't have worked so hard. And then from both men and women, I wish I wouldn't have worried about what other people thought and that I would have stayed true to what I thought I was supposed to be doing in life or what God had called me to do. But I let fear and others' opinions hold me back. And so we can take a lot of reflection from people who are on their deathbed who don't sit there and say, I am so glad that I have a million dollars in the bank. I am so glad that I missed so much because I was so laser-beamed focused on my career that I didn't build a relationship with my kids or I didn't invest in dating my wife or vice versa. I didn't invest in prioritizing time with my husband or valuing him for what he was doing for our family. I didn't sit face to face with my kids. We let phones take over all of the things that were running our lives and we became distracted and distant. And here we are, it. What are you chasing? What is it? And is it worth it if that's what you have at the end of your life? And so when we take all of this information from the last three weeks, when we dig into all of this and we think about what are the things that we set out to accomplish, how are we doing on them? Have we gained clarity on why those are the things that we're chasing after that we want to get disciplined in? And if they're not lining up with this teaching us to number our days to totally understand that life is fleeting and the things that matter are the things that we should be focusing on. Do you need to change some things up? Again, remember the pack horse that can go a long distance. He's slow and steady and disciplined and balanced and he finishes the journey. But the racehorse who wants it to look good, who gets the likes, who gets the shares, he's flashy, he's short-lived, he's emotionally driven, and he burns out. And I think our society has pushed us to believe that the race horses are the horses that we should be, when in reality, it's this pack horse that understands the true meaning of life, that's going to go slow and steady, consistent, even when it's not flashy, even when it's not pretty, because we're confident that in the muddy, mucky trail that we're walking through, we've been trained to not be so taken off course by distraction because we're focused in on, Lord, teach me to number my days, teach me to walk in step with the things that matter. And as I start to understand more and more what that is that matters, read your Bible and you will start to understand what the things are that really matter, how you show up every day. You will start to see that pattern of the things that need to be our priorities, that we can go a long distance and that we would have a heart of wisdom because we have come to understand that. And so a couple of questions that I want to leave you with. I know that's a lot to process, and I hope that it's been thought-provoking. Again, please take the time. If you're gonna be in the car, this breathing room series would be a fantastic series to listen to with your spouse. Maybe you have some older kids. I've been listening to it in the car actually with my 16-year-old son. And I just I encourage you just to take the time to listen to that and really ponder. But here's some questions as we wrap up for today. Am I running like a race horse or am I walking like a pack horse? What noise? And that noise for you could be comparison, scrolling, pressure, outside voices. What voices or noise do I need to quiet so I can stay focused on my own race? What am I carrying that God never asked me to carry? What does balance look like to me in this season of life? Where do I need to trust that God is still working even when I don't see much evidence yet? How can I measure faithfulness instead of perfection? Am I living with wisdom of understanding my days are numbered? And do my actions reflect that? That's a lot to think on, friends. A lot of contemplating and heavy things that all of a sudden your to-do list and your all these things that I wanted to accomplish or I wanted to put on my board for this year, they narrow down to what are the the few things? What are the few things that if I committed to staying consistent could drastically impact my life 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now, so that I wouldn't have those same regrets that so many people on hospice in those last 12 weeks have because I learned early on to number my days and walk with a heart of wisdom. And so, friends, that is gonna wrap up this series. I hope that this has been beneficial for you. I hope that if you have taken some ahas away from it, or if it's helped you maybe focus in on just the importance of evaluating and getting clarity that you might share this with a friend, a family member, whether that be through sharing on your socials or texting it, how we get into the algorithms of more and more homes, of people who are looking to cultivate strong families, is by you guys sharing, liking, rating, and reviewing the show. And so it is such an honor every time one of you do that and you tag me. It means the world that you are sharing the podcast with others. And so if you're willing to do that, I would be so grateful. We will be back here next week. We've got tons of exciting stuff coming up this season in season three, lots of fun interviews, some really fun, different series, and just excited for all the programming that we have coming for you in 2026. But until next week, friends, take care of it.