This Prepared Life
Welcome to This Prepared Life, a podcast for women where preparedness feels peaceful, practical, and possible. Hosted by Allison Michael, this show is about creating a calmer, more resilient life through everyday preparedness and intentional living. Inside the episodes, you’ll find realistic food storage tips, Allison’s Three Layer Food Storage system, preparedness skills, homemaking rhythms, and encouragement to help you care for yourself and your family with more confidence and less overwhelm. From emergency preparedness and food preservation to homemaking and building a well-stocked pantry, this podcast offers practical guidance to help preparedness feel more natural in your everyday life. Whether you’re filling your first pantry shelf or have been preparing for years, you can expect simple action steps, honest conversations, and a reminder that preparedness does not have to come from fear. Here, we believe in being prepared, not scared — one pantry shelf, skill, and intentional step at a time.
This Prepared Life
3 Ways to Focus Your Preparedness - Ep15
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Prparedness is about your mindset. Join me today for three ways that you can focus your preparedness. We talk about skills, failure, and more.
The video mentioned can be found herehttps://www.instagram.com/p/CUvcgHWB2G3/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
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Welcome to this Prepared Life podcast where homestudying and the apocalypse meet. I'm Alison, your host. Hello, and welcome to This Prepared Life. In October, I asked my Instagram followers for their questions, and we did a bit of a QA over the span of a week or so. And one of those questions was how to incorporate prepping as a lifestyle. And in response to that, I did an IGTV video answering that question. And you can find that at This Prepared Life. But I wanted to talk about that in just a little more detail here on the podcast. And for those of you who don't follow me over on Instagram, let's start with I think that there's a misconception that prepping or preppers that our days are just full of prepper things. And I hope that if anything, this podcast and the stories shared here have showed you that women who prep are the same as everyone else. We are all just wives and moms and grandmas living our lives and doing laundry and working. We aren't dusting our bunkers and donning our battle gear on a daily basis in our prepper journey. Um, we just happen to have food storage and supplies tucked away just in case, and we're ready for the things to come as much as we can be. Sometimes my days have a lot of what you might call prepper things going on. Maybe I'm filling the freeze dryer or packing Mylar bags. And some days I am so busy doing kid pickups and laundry and taking the dog's potty that it seems like nothing prepper-like got done at all. So, how prepping is a lifestyle is all about our mindset. It's a mental focus on how we do things, why we do things, and what we are doing. So for me, having a prepper mindset means that we are actively working to remove ourselves from systems and specifically the food chain. I've shared before about our homesteading journey and our prepping journey. And that is our one of our biggest goals to produce as much of our own food as possible on our homestead. Um, and if I lived in the city, we wouldn't be able to have that goal because we wouldn't have a homestead, but I would focus on that differently. I would be finding local farmers, I would be stocking up on freeze-dried goods. You don't have to have a homestead to be a prepper. So there are three categories that I wanted to share about today that make up what I consider a prepper mindset. And the first one is our finances. For us, we prioritize our finances with our preps in mind. We make it a priority to pay off debt. We pay for things with cash, we budget for things, we save, we tell our money where to go, and we prioritize our purchases. We want a lot of things. But the next item we are prioritizing is a hand pump for our well. And yeah, we could just go on vacations and buy coffees and TVs and life would be grand. But that's not where we believe our focus needs to be. And each of us gets to make our own choices and decisions. So for us, we make goals for our money, we prioritize our purchases, we budget, and we tell our money what to do. The second thing that makes up a proper mindset is time. And there is only so much time in the day. I get that. How we manage our time matters. For us, a lot of our time is spent focused on things around the homestead that will meet that goal of food production. And we are okay with that. Um, we don't go on fancy vacations, we spend a lot of time here doing projects and chores. And, you know, as we add animals and things, it does get harder to go on vacations because you have to find farm sitters and people who can watch those things. But um, even before we had a lot of animals, we just didn't do that. Our focus was on other priorities. So my husband works, obviously, someone works, and he spends a lot of his time when he is not working, his breaks and evenings doing projects that further our goals. And that is how he prioritizes his time. Tell your time what to do. Make plans, make goals and do them. Number three is knowledge and learning. And this is a big one. Part of our proper mindset is prioritizing what we are learning. New skills are important. Developing skills that we already have further is important. And Joe and I are both always trying something new and learning something new, researching something, reading books about something. It just makes up part of who we both are as our personality. We're very um knowledge-driven and hungry for information. And we go find that when we find a topic that we're interested in. So we are both always trying something new. And knowledge is there if you take the time and put the effort into it. It is not just going to be given to you on a silver platter. You have to seek it out. If you see a concept that interests you, go search it. Go check out a book at the library, go find more information, figure out how to do it, what it is, why it happens, find the information. Sometimes these are big things and sometimes these are small things. The size and scope of a skill doesn't matter. It's the attempt that matters, it's the learning that matters, and it's the knowledge that you gained that matters. Last night, um, I was scrolling through Instagram stories and an account I follow. Um, she's up in Alaska, and um I think I've followed her for, I don't know, a while. Um, but she does a lot of gardening and kitchen stuff and fermenting, and she's just great information. But she was processing through apple scrap vinegar that she had made several weeks prior, and it was the first time she had done it, and she was filtering it. And I have been processing apples the last couple days, so that became my goal. I have these apple scraps and I was I saw this idea, and so I am going to research that and make some apple scrap vinegar, and I'm gonna see what that's like. I've never done it before. I don't even have any plans on what I'm gonna do with it. I will figure that out as I go. Will it work? Maybe. Will it mold and be disgusting? Maybe. But it doesn't matter if it's a success or not. I will have the knowledge and I will have the hands-on experience of doing it. Trying something new isn't about perfection. I read something a few years back that I just really loved. And my kids have been in 4-H for years. Side note, but 4-H is just an incredible program, and I highly recommend it. It has programs all over city, country, it doesn't matter, and all kinds of projects. It's not just about animals. You can do sewing or cooking, all kinds of things. But in 4-H, they get judged on their projects on, I think they call it the Danish scale, and it's white, red, and blue ribbons. And it's um, there's a standard for each project, and the ribbon you get is, you know, based on how well did you meet that standard for that bread you baked or that applesauce you canned, things like that. And so I came across a saying that said, um, and I wish I knew who said it, but I don't. I learned more from my white ribbons than my blue ones. And that is just so true. Ladies, we learn more from our failures than our successes. Do not be afraid to try new things. So those are three things that I think are important for a proper lifestyle: finances, time, and knowledge and skills. Do not be discouraged by your progress. Every little thing matters, every skill matters. And I think when we are on social media, it is so easy to see these picture perfect squares and think that we will never get there. We get overwhelmed by the sheer volume. And you need to remember that the people you follow are just farther along in their journey, and your journey looks different. Those people didn't start yesterday. I didn't start yesterday. You are seeing years and years of hard work and years of making mistakes and years of trying again, and years of little by little by little. So do not be discouraged in your journey when you look at someone else's. You were right where you are meant to be, and whether you make it to your next step is up to you. So learn from your failures, never give up, and prioritize your mindset to make preparedness part of your journey. Thanks for listening today. Thanks so much for listening today. And until next time, remember, every little thing matters, and a goal without a plan is just a wish. If you have questions, you can find me on Instagram at this prepared life. I'd love to connect with you over there. You can also find me on the internet at www.thispreparedlife.com. And if you enjoyed today's podcast, I would love it if you would leave me a review on Apple Podcasts.