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
The Next Best Thing: Letting Go of the Pressure to Do It All
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After a long pause from the podcast, I'm sharing some of the lessons I've learned through one of the hardest seasons of my life.
Life can change in ways we never expected. Sometimes the season we are in requires us to let go of the pressure to do it all and focus on what matters most.
In this episode, I share a simple analogy that has helped me think differently about capacity, expectations, and grace. We talk about why it is okay to say no to good things, how our ability to carry responsibilities changes from season to season, and why focusing on the next best thing can bring more peace than striving to do everything.
I also share a little about the life changes that led to the pause in this podcast and some of the lessons I learned during that time.
If you have been feeling overwhelmed, stretched too thin, or discouraged by everything on your plate, I hope this conversation encourages you to give yourself grace and take one intentional step forward.
Remember, you do not have to do everything. You only need to focus on the next best thing.
If this episode encouraged you, please leave a review and share it with a friend. Your support helps more women discover This Prepared Life.
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Welcome to This Prepared Life, a podcast for women where preparedness feels peaceful, practical, and possible. I'm Allison, and together we're building a calmer, more resilient life, one pantry shelf, skill, and intentional step at a time. Today I hope that you leave feeling encouraged and supported in your life and for your next best step. Ladies, we are overwhelmed and overworked and busy, busy, busy. And some of that is our own doing. We have expectations of ourselves and we pile things on and then we're stressed and wondering why. And it doesn't have to be that way. Are there seasons where it is that way? Yes, absolutely. But it doesn't have to always be that way. It is okay to say no, even if it's a good thing. And that is a lesson that I learned the hard way. I mean, there were seasons in my life where homeschooling the kids and doing 4-H and all the homemaking tasks and the laundry and the making dinner, and then I would say yes to things because I didn't want to miss out, or it sounded fun, but did I really have the space for that? So, you know, speaking of myself here, not just you guys, but I I think as women, when we are so stressed out and anxious and overwhelmed, we really need to stop and take a step back and focus and be intentional about what we are putting on our plates. I absolutely love the analogy. And if you've been around here for a while or follow me over on Instagram, I'm sure you have heard me use this before, but we are all a plate. And I want you to imagine a beautiful dining room table, right? And it is full of all different kinds of plates. Whatever color is your favorite, just that is the theme here. There are turkey platters and tea saucers and salad plates, and maybe there's even paper plates. Paper plates with those like wicker things so they don't crumble. Did you guys ever have those? We always had those when I was a kid. I haven't seen those in a very long time. But all different kinds of plates, pretty plates and utilitarian plates, and just this dining room table full of plates. We all only have so much room on our plates. And maybe when you get up in the morning, you're a turkey platter and you were like, I can fit all these things on. And then maybe the next day you get up and you're a tea saucer. Because life happens. Things happen in our lives. They mean our capacity is less. And we need to say no to good things, and we need to say no to bad things too. Like there are things we should absolutely not be saying no to or saying yes to. But what kind of a plate are you today is a question that I think we should be asking ourselves because it changes. It changes each day that you wake up based on what is going on in your life. And it also changes from morning to afternoon to evening as the day gets busier and kids and life and husbands and housework and all of the things. But we can only fit so much on our plates before things start falling off and splattering on the floor. If you have been around here for a while, you probably noticed that this podcast got really quiet for about three years, about five years actually, with a little spurt in there where I tried to revive it. Or if you're new here, you've probably seen the gap in the episodes, and you're like, why is there a three-year gap in the episodes? I didn't plan to stop podcasting. I absolutely love podcasting. It is a creative project for me. It is so fun. And, you know, I am in a place in my life of empty nests and all my kids leaving the house where I have time to devote to a creative project like this. I had a lot of plans for this prepared life, for the membership, for my Instagram, for this podcast specifically. I had episode ideas, projects I wanted to create, and things that I wanted to share with all of you. But life just has a way of changing our plans. It has a way of throwing things at us that change our capacity. And sometimes those things are huge, large, life-altering things. And sometimes those things are less life-altering, but they do not impact us any less. We still only have so much room on our plate. So I didn't plan to stop podcasting. And in 2021, my 18-year-old son, Michael, died in an accident. And it was, as you can imagine, everything changed overnight. My capacity changed. Uh, you know, we really, all of us, my entire family, the girls and Joe and I, we just everything went into survival mode. That is not an emergency that you can plan for. It is not an emergency that you can even imagine planning for. And I think that's for a reason that is probably another podcast episode. But when Michael died, things changed for me drastically. The things that felt important suddenly weren't. And my focus shifted to my family, to grieving, and honestly, to just getting through each day. I couldn't fit anymore on my plate. This was a large, life-altering thing. So I stepped away. Not because I stopped believing in preparedness or stopped caring about this community. I just simply didn't have the capacity anymore. And now I'm back. I am at a place in my grief where I feel like, you know, I have some room on my plate for this creative energy. You know, that is a very catastrophic, drastic example of suddenly having to shift what we can fit on our plate. But ladies, life happens every day. And it doesn't have to be these drastic, catastrophic events that mean we need to shift our focus and be intentional and focus where we can best serve our people and love our people. That is something that I think we all can do all the time. All we can do is do our next best thing. We can create space for our next best thing. And sometimes those next best things are insulating ourselves and focusing on family and stepping back to do some big inside work. Uh, you know, I'm talking about me and dealing with grief and the loss of my son and the health of my family and the health of myself. But sometimes that's stepping back and creating space because it's important that we are serving our families or serving our community or showing up at church or for the friend, or, you know, the list goes on of the things that happen in our lives that are important things. So what kind of a plate are you? Are you a tea saucer? Are you a turkey platter? Neither is better than the other. They're all valid and they are all good things. What's most important is are you seeing what kind of a plate you are today and intentionally focusing on your next best step? I hope that this episode encouraged you to be more intentional, to love your people, and to give yourself grace for where you're at and the capacity that you have every day. Thank you so much for listening. Leave a review if you enjoyed this episode so other women can find this Prepared Life podcast. Together, we're building calmer, more resilient lives, one pantry shelf skill, an intentional step at a time.