How to Get Shit Done Like a Super Mom

Becoming a mom is usually surrounded with joy, right?  But it's also easy to use your motherhood as justification for putting all of your life goals and dreams on the back burner.

You tell yourself that you're just going to spend these few years with your little one and then eventually you'll go back to work and eventually you'll resume your "normal" life, right? You'll get back to the gym, catch up on your scrapbooks, read all those books. You'll go back to college or grad school or get a new certification, maybe start a new business.

You know... all those things, all those goals and dreams that you had before you became a mother.

You tell yourself to just live in the moment, enjoy your kiddos, and someday you will have the opportunity to bring back those goals. While all of those thoughts are true, what I have found after being a mother for a decade is that the right time to get yourself back on track for your goals never comes.

There Is No "Right" Time to Follow Your Dreams

I know. It's kind of a sad reality check right there to hear that, but it's the truth. There's always going to be another reason why your goals are going to need to take the backseat.

There's going to be another baby (that happened to me - our third baby was a total surprise). There's going to be toddlerhood, you're going to have a spirited child, one of your children will be more difficult than the other. There's going to be sports when they get older. There's gonna be childhood activities. That activity list gets so long, even when we say no to everything. We're spending a lot of time traveling, doing things, paying for things, buying her the right outfit for the things, making sure clothes fit... (oh my gosh, don't even get me started on shopping for three girls).

So all of that stuff happens, and before we know it, our kids are preparing for college. And we're so busy managing the house and our social calendar, that our dreams have basically faded. And in those quiet moments of your day, which are few and far between, sometimes you start to reflect on just how short life really is.

Mothers everywhere get a punch in the gut when they have that moment where they just think about time going so fast. You're regretting those moments where you felt so stressed out, when all you wish for was a little bit of a break away from your kids. You felt guilt for that but at the same time in that moment you needed that time away from the kids, right? And then when you really start thinking about how fast time has gone by, you realize there's never going to be time for me. There's never going to be time for me to reach my goals. There's no time left in the day for me to even dream about what I want out of life.

Don't get me wrong. I appreciate being a mom, I appreciate being a wife. I appreciate all of those things. I'm sure you do, too. But that doesn't mean that I have to put myself last forever and ever. Because what's going to happen when our kids leave the nest, and we're just left to our ourselves? Your house will stay a lot cleaner so you won't be consumed with cleaning the house. You're not going to be cooking for as many people unless you're fortunate enough to have grand babies right away. So what will you do with your time? And are you setting yourself up for that now?

And I know, I know, I know. They're only young once and it's gonna be a short period of time. And you can always reinvent yourself when you're 45 or 55, or 60, or whatever it is, when your kids leave the house. That may be true.

But what if you can't?

What if by the time you get there everything you've ever dreamed of doing, you can't do? Do you really want to pass that opportunity up?  

Take Control and Make Time For Yourself Right Now

I want to reach for the goals that I have without giving up time with my kids. And I know that's something that society says we just shouldn't strive for. But I disagree. I am a living example of being able to have those goals, have those visions, spend the time with my kids, and feel almost entirely content with the time that I've invested in my family as well as myself.

It's up to us as moms, as the women that raised our children, to seize the day and really make our lives exactly what we want them to be. It doesn't have to be perfect and no day will ever be the same as any other day of the week what we do have choices.

I so strongly disagree with people who say that we don't have choices or that we should stop striving for these other things because we have children and that's the only thing that matters. Yes, the children come first.

But we can also choose to get shit done, okay? Just like the super moms that we are, we can get all that stuff done. We can choose a level of cleanliness of our homes. We can decide how we feed our families. We can also be productively present parents if that's what we decide to be and all it takes is a decision... a decision within you, and a decision within your household whether that means including your spouse, or including your children, whatever the case may be.

But at the end of the day, what you decide needs to resonate with you. What you decide needs to make you feel like you leave nothing on the field when you leave this scheme of life. I don't want to leave anything on the field. What about you? I'm not saying I want to run myself ragged every single day of my life until I pass out on the bed. But some days I do that. And some of those days are my most fulfilling days where I went to every soccer game with the kids, I ran, I worked out and I cleaned the house and I fed the kids and I spent time with my friends and spend time with my husband and I worked on my business, and I crashed at night, and I just crawl into bed feeling so fulfilled.

And then there's other days where I do absolutely nothing but spend time with my kids, whether it's sitting on the couch and reading books, or we go for a little leisurely walk, or we literally stay inside because it's raining. And I go to bed content then too because I chose my day. My day did not control me. There have been times in my past where my day is controlling. I mean, that's just part of motherhood. But the older I get and the more I parent and the more I use my systems and tools, the less my day controls me, the more I control it. And it's all about a decision.

Get Shit Done by Figuring Out What Really Matters

When it comes time for you to make a decision about what you want to get done, you have to know what shit matters. Not everything matters. Some days, the laundry doesn't matter, because it doesn't really help get you closer to your goals.

So, what do you want out of life? What do you actually want? You wouldn't get in your car and just start driving without a plan or deciding where you're going to go. That's your anger or something, right? So why would you approach your life that way? Why would you just say, "Well, I have these goals, and someday I'll think about them. I'm sure that everything I'm doing now is at least leading me towards it."

No, it's not.

You're just living life. You're letting your days go by and they're controlling you. Why wouldn't you create a plan? And I'm not saying that everything has to be planned and scheduled. I mean, that does help. But you just need to have identified your priorities in life.

Where are you now? Where are you? What are you doing? Are you in the middle of chaos? Because you have a toddler and a newborn? Are you transitioning between being at home and going to work? Are you transitioning from working outside of the home, and now you're coming back into the home? Where are you in life right now?

You know, my husband has only so many years left in his military retirement. But with the state of our world today, there was just this big moment in both of our lives where we were thinking that in the grand scheme of things five to seven years is just a drop in the bucket in life. In those five to seven years our older child will mature, she will become 18. Our middle child will be 15. And her youngest kid will be 11.

So yeah, he could retire then. And it would be great, right? He'd have a decent little retirement check that he would have for the rest of his life for the next 20 or 30 years. But for that 20 or 30 years of retirement, we're giving up the last five to seven years with our oldest tribe. So we realized we get one life here on earth, and money isn't everything. Experience is everything, time with our family and loved ones and our children. It's everything, making an impact on the world. Whether it's financially or just with our own time, it's worth everything looking into someone's face, when you have helped them change their life.

So we made the huge decision that he's going to walk away from retirement this year. And depending on when you're reading this, we may already be on the road and living our new chapter and just living the life that we know we were meant for.

And I believe that everybody has some big vision. Every mom has some big vision that she's kind of shying away from it for fear of losing time with her kids and I'm just pleading with you don't have that kind of attitude.

You can have everything that you want in life. It's not greedy. You're not focusing on the wrong things. You can just sit down and make a priority list and decide how to achieve what you want out of life. And I would love to be a partner in that. There's nothing that makes me happier. I mean, my kids make me super happy but I love watching other families change the course of their lives forever. With like saying yes to one tiny little step in a different direction, a direction they've never thought about before. And just watching what happens with that one little step like the domino effect is just pretty incredible.

Set Your Own Priorities for Getting Shit Done

So what do you really want? Describe it, write it down. Where are you right now? Where do you want to be? And when? Where do you want to be at the end of this year? Where do you want to be in five years? What do you want to be in 10 years? Where do you want to be? Every day until your kids leave the house?

And what are you doing right now that's helping you get to where you want to be?

But more importantly, what are you doing right now? What are you prioritizing right now?

We're just adding to your to do list that has absolutely nothing to do with where you want to be in life. How many things are on your to do list right now that you consider top priority, that have absolutely nothing to do with where you want to be in life. I'm not saying that you throw them out. You can't be like, "Well, my husband's dry cleaning's on my way to the daycare. So I guess I could just not pick that up because it takes like six minutes."

I'm not saying that. But it is important to look at those things, okay? Those things take up mental space, they take up weight on your body and in your mind, because it's something that you know you have to do. And so, if you're going around all day, thinking of all the things you have to do, and the dry cleaning's one of those things that's weighing you down, you need to put it on a piece of paper and say, yeah, this is something I have to do. It's not contributing to my future goals, but it is not weighing me down either. Okay, it's like a minuscule little task that really doesn't impede my life that I have to do that nothing to do with my goals. So I have time in my life for something more important. I'm still going to do that task, but I am going to make time in my schedule for something more important.

Now, moms don't take time to dream. They don't. So you need to prioritize some time for yourself to dream and decide what you want out of life.

If you have a brand new baby, getting to the end of this year feeling like the mother that you want to be - the supermom that you want to be - is probably the biggest goal you can think of right now. But I encourage you to go a little bit beyond that. Where do you want to be in three years? What's your shooting for the moon kind of goal? And I'm not talking about, like creating an empire business, (or maybe that is your goal). But maybe after this newborn phase is over, I would really love to prioritize working out and spending time with my friends and my family and also my husband without my children. I want to prioritize these things. I want to read 123 books each year, even though I'm a mother.

Whatever those goals are, I want you to write them down. And I want you to think bigger.

Create an Actionable Plan to Get Shit Done

Then you need to create an action plan. Goals are great, but how are you going to reach them? You have to have a plan. This may be a daily action plan. It may be a weekly action plan or monthly and so forth. And super overwhelmed moms have to refine that action plan even further. You have to toss out a lot of things and you need to take your bigger tasks and break them down into smaller ones.

So something like preparing the nursery for a newborn baby. That is a task, but it doesn't go on your action plan as the only task, okay? Break it down:

• clean up the closet
• find the mattress
• set up the bed
• paint the walls
• dusting
• wash the linens...

Take all those things and make a bunch of tasks. It's not making your to do list worse. It's making your to do lists more actionable and more realistic. Because you can do one to five of those things every single day. If I were to look at the nursery and say I have to get this all prepared, I would be overwhelmed.

Why don't we just do that for ourselves? Because it seems like such a menial task to sit down and write out all the steps for that project, but it's so so, so important.

If you're a brand new mom or like an expectant mom and you haven't had a baby, then maybe you can tackle the nursery in a weekend. But I'm so far past that I can't even think like that anymore. I would have to break that task down. And that's how you should approach pretty much every large task in your life.

Hold Yourself Accountable to Get Shit Done

The last thing I want to tell you about getting stuff done is accountability. You need to invest in yourself with some form of a reward, and accountability.

I have a coach that I pay for who keeps me on track and she holds me accountable. I know that seems weird if you're a mom with a big vision of what you want out of life. But I need you to invest in yourself in one way or another, whether it's with time and giving yourself the time that you need to carry out these things for time and money. Because without investing in yourself, you're costing yourself more time and you're costing yourself more money. You're doing all the things that you don't need to do. You're probably very inefficient with them. And just as time is precious, time is more valuable than money.

So if you could pay someone to help you create more time in your day, then you're getting more time in your day and you can do things that you love and then your life is more valuable to you because you're actually making progress towards your goals.

Are You Ready to Get Shit Done Like a Super Mom?

I want to give you a taste of what it's like to invest in yourself and to have a big win. So I want to give you my Super Mom's Guide to Getting Sh!t Done. It can change your life, if you follow through with it, if you actually do the steps that are in it. And it's completely free. Just click here to get your copy now. 

I challenge you to carry out all the steps in that guide, and see if it doesn't make a difference in your life.

And for some of you, it will make such a big difference that you want more. And it's totally possible that if you and I work together, we could create even bigger changes in your life. Like I said, I'm a living example of what I can do with time. So if you want to work together, you can book a free discovery call with me.

Because if if there's been any lesson to be learned in this century, is that life is short, things can change, and you never know what the future is going to hold. And so it's so important that we look at our lives and make an assessment of what's really important to us. And we strive for that, stop putting things off. Just stop putting things off.

So I hope that you found this helpful. I know that if you use theSuper Mom's Guide to Getting Sh!t Done you'll have a lot of benefit out of it and I would love to hear how it goes. Leave me a comment here, or email me -  I want to hear your progress.

It's one of the biggest, greatest joys of my life to see how I can help other moms reclaim that time with their kids and themselves.

Take care, crunchy super mom.