Adventurous Mom

Archive for the ‘time management’ Category

Whether you are on the fence about what energy means to you, we all have it.  In fact, I can hook you up to an EKG machine and instantly tell you whether your heart has a healthy energy rhythm or not!  Our entire bod­ies are arranged on many lev­els of ener­getic prin­ci­pals and some that we don’t even know about!

So you know when you’re around some peo­ple or events that just drain your energy?  You know who I’m talk­ing about, is it Aunt Martha that likes to talk a lot about her health prob­lems, or is it the boss that pushes his agenda onto you?  Here are 6 Great Tips to Pro­tect your energy from them!

1.  Real­ize that it is YOUR energy and you don’t have to share it

Often times you feel an oblig­a­tion to share your energy with some­one that may clearly breach your space and energy. Women are very sus­cep­ti­ble to this because we think that we must be nice, or we must be accom­mo­dat­ing.  We don’t want to offend any­one, so we’d rather allow them to infringe our energy and suck us dry.  This does not honor your energy!  When you feel some­one breach­ing your energy, take a step back and eval­u­ate.  Ask your­self, “Who’s energy am I sharing…and it is worth it?”

2.   GROUND your Energy

Ever heard of the phrase, your best defense is a good offense?  This is the same con­cept.  Hav­ing in your aware­ness that your energy should be grounded will allow you to not be sus­cep­ti­ble to energy zap­pers.  One way to do this is to align your body in a straight up and down posi­tion, and close your eyes.  You can also imag­ine an imag­i­nary line run­ning from your belly but­ton to the ground (3 or 4 feet below you) and then from your belly but­ton, to chest through your head and to the sky.  In ancient cul­tures this would be called, “Align­ing your Hara”, but we’ll call it Get­ting Grounded.  Take three deep breaths and con­cen­trate on get­ting grounded.  This will allow you to align your energy to be fully aware of your sur­round­ings and your energy.  So key!

3.  Your Time, Your Money and Your Resources are Energy

Has any­one ever taken up too much of your time?  Is it that pesky sales per­son or the oblig­a­tions that you feel to run the PTA, or to clean the house inside and out every day? Or have peo­ple asked for money and you did not want to give it?  It just did not feel right?  These are all exam­ples that your energy extends to your resources beyond your body.  Hon­or­ing your time energy, and your money energy to be in align­ment with what is true for you instead of what is true for oth­ers is another way to elim­i­nate those energy zap­pers.  If you spend your resources because you feel oblig­ated rather than hav­ing the choice or the desire to do so zaps your energy.  Be aware of your choices regard­ing these energies.

4.  NO is the new YES

This is a won­der­ful say­ing that a good friend Ken Bech­tel at Find­ing You in the Goo uses con­stantly.  Instead of feel­ing ener­get­i­cally that NO is a neg­a­tive con­cept, real­ize that when you say no, you are say­ing YES to your­self.  And who is the most impor­tant per­son in this world to you?  YOU.  So, honor your impor­tance and be okay with say­ing NO to oth­ers, you are in fact say­ing YES to yourself!

5.  Bound­aries, Bound­aries, Boundaries

When I first real­ized I had bound­ary issues, I imme­di­ately thought “No way, peo­ple with bound­ary issues are those that are like door­mats, they’ll do what­ever, when­ever for whoever…that’s not me.”  But it was, and it was a hor­ri­ble eye opener!

Bound­aries come in many shapes and sizes.  Bound­aries, whether phys­i­cal, or ener­getic, are so very impor­tant to hon­or­ing your­self.  Are you get­ting pushed around at work because you are not will­ing to stand up and fight the good fight?  It is just eas­ier to go with the flow?  Are you uncom­fort­able with how fast your spouse dri­ves the car with your kids in the car, but you aren’t allowed to say any­thing?  These are all exam­ples of bound­aries.  It is really about you—not about them.  In order to be clear about your bound­aries, you must be clear about what you are okay with, and what you are not okay with.

6.  Push or Pull Your Energy When necessary

When con­fronted with a per­sis­tent energy, it may become nec­es­sary to Push your energy, or to Pull on another’s energy.  What this essen­tially does is gives you the POWER to be able to make change, get proac­tive and take back your energy.  I have found that when I am in con­tact with some­one who likes to pull my energy, or drain me, I often have to PUSH back.  Some­times I give lit­tle warn­ings, or lit­tle sig­nals, and when they do not respond, and then I give a decent ener­getic push.  It does not have to be mean, and the push can come from a sim­ple state­ment with good inten­tions.  “I’d really love to explain why I did what I did, but I do not feel that this is the right time or place to engage in such a con­ver­sa­tion.”  Assertive, respect­ful, and direct.  This is what occurs when your energy is in align­ment with your intentions.

You may be think­ing that a lot of this is deal­ing with nor­mal human emo­tions, but there is an ener­getic shift that occurs even before the emo­tions occur or the dis­cus­sion hap­pens.  This is the energy that I am talk­ing about.  Most of you have felt energy when you’re around some­one that is angry, the energy feels harsh, or when you’re around some­one depressed, the energy feels drain­ing.  Pro­tect­ing your­self from the volatile energy zap­pers starts with you, a good defense and an aware­ness of energy.

For now, Be Grounded, Be Whole, and Be Ener­get­i­cally Adventurous!!

Let me know how your energy is today, leave a com­ment or a ques­tion! I love feedback!

Wel­come back!  This is the 2^nd post of 3 in my Tips for Stress Reduc­tion.  I cre­ated these posts when I real­ized that Stress is the num­ber one epi­demic in our coun­try, which leads to many life-threatening med­ical con­di­tions such as car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease, dia­betes, obe­sity etc…

Yet, as I have per­son­ally expe­ri­enced, doc­tors will diag­nose your con­di­tion as “stress related” but then just hand you a nice lit­tle pill to take.  I’m not dis­count­ing the neces­sity of med­ica­tions in cer­tain instances, hav­ing been in the health­care field for as long as I have, I com­pletely agree med­ica­tions in cer­tain patients are a neces­sity.  But what if your con­di­tion is cre­ated in your own real­ity? What if the lit­tle pill doesn’t cure the under­ly­ing problem?

This is the ques­tion you can ask yourself.

So in Part 1, the idea was to get you to iden­tify that you, as a par­ent, need to take care of your­self first.  We talked about iden­ti­fy­ing your energy lev­els, and slow­ing down your speeds.  Step 1 was to bring into your aware­ness WHEN you noticed that you were stressed out.

Now in Part 2, we iden­tify 3 Sim­ple Steps to get into action to reduce your stress.

Step 1 — Do Less

What? Do less? ….I can hear all of the “yeah but” com­ments now.  So let me clar­ify: Just Do Less.

This step in its sim­plic­ity can some­times be a dif­fi­cult step to rec­on­cile to your­self because you will argue for your stress.  Doing less is a sim­ple deci­sion you can make.  Let me ask you these ques­tions: Do you need to attend every birth­day party for every child in your son or daughter’s class?  Do you need to have your child enrolled in every extracur­ric­u­lar activ­ity leav­ing you run­ning from base­ball to bal­let to piano lessons?

Doing less can extend to spend­ing less money and pos­si­bly elim­i­nat­ing the need to work so much!  Sim­plic­ity is a very free­ing feel­ing. We were able to man­age as humans in a sim­ple world before there was money, can we not man­age now?  Leo Babuta writes a beau­ti­ful blog at www.ZenHabits.net that focuses on sim­plic­ity.  Check it out, you may learn that there exists another real­ity about a sim­ple life.

Doing less can also mean instead of hav­ing to take the fam­ily to the lake, or ski­ing, or on activ­i­ties to feel like that is what proper fam­i­lies should do when spend­ing time together.  Doing less can sim­ply mean, stay at home, read books, have mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tions, be still and enjoy your time together.

Step 2 – When you have a lot to do, then con­sider Batching

Per­haps you’ve heard of batch­ing as some­thing that peo­ple do when they send out large amounts of mail.  At least that’s what I think of when I think of batch­ing.  I first learned about batch­ing from Tim Fer­ris, author and Lifestyle designer.  I have been employ­ing the idea of batch­ing for a while now.  It is some­what against what my mother taught me grow­ing up, but it allows me to focus my atten­tion and my time on pro­duc­tiv­ity rather than menial tasks all day long.

Here are some exam­ples of how you can employ batch­ing in your life today:

1. Laun­dry – The dreaded laun­dry!  My mother always used to say that it was eas­ier if I did a lit­tle bit every day, but hav­ing to think about laun­dry every­day was a men­tal drain, and a time drain.  Instead we batch our laun­dry once or twice a week.
2. Bill Pay­ing – If you don’t already have a great sys­tem set up, per­haps bill pay­ing can be batched weekly or bi-weekly.
3. Gro­cery Shop­ping – Mak­ing daily trips to the gro­cery store not only drains your energy and your time, but can inevitably drain your pock­et­book as you are more likely to spend over your bud­get with fre­quent trips.  Instead batch your gro­cery shop­ping into a weekly task.

I am sure you can come up with other ideas for batch­ing.  The con­cept is that you get to allow your­self to tem­porar­ily for­get about a task know­ing that you’ll get back to it at a pre-determined time. You are not ignor­ing the task; you are just defer­ring it and instead putting your atten­tion to get­ting other things done.

Stress is some­times a prod­uct of multi-tasking.  New research on this phe­nom­e­non shows that peo­ple are most effec­tive when they can UNI-task, and their stress lev­els are lower.  So focus on ONE thing at a time.  Other, more mun­dane tasks can wait!  So batch on!!

Step 3 – Elicit Teamwork!

I was recently coach­ing an over­worked an over­stressed mom that had 3 teenage boys at home!  She says, I’m so tired when I get home, but there’s so much to be done!  We came up with a plan to elicit team­work from her fam­ily so that she does not feel that all of the work needs to fall on her shoulders.

I owe this solu­tion to my dad, a per­fec­tion­ist with house­work, retired Navy and raised Navy brat, he was a stick­ler for a clean house.  When I was 9, he sat my sis­ters and I down, and asked us to out­line every sin­gle chore that had to be done in the house.  When we were done, we divided the chores into 3 areas.  One was kitchen/dishes, then there was the bath­room and linens, lastly was the liv­ing area.  We were then each respon­si­ble for our areas each week, and we rotated once per week.  It was easy for my dad to keep track of who’s area of respon­si­bil­ity it was that week, and then he was able to be the house­hold man­ager, instead of the custodian.

Can you pull together your team?  Who is your team? Your fam­ily, kids, grand­par­ents?  As the man­ager and leader of your house­hold, you can elicit their team­work.  Gain their inter­est, ask for their involve­ment, and get their feed­back.  It is eas­i­est to get buy-in for chores and duties when it is THEIR idea, not yours.  But they will want to be a part of this great team.  Team mem­bers as young as 2 can also take part in con­tribut­ing to the house!!

Thank you for fol­low­ing along!  Please feel free to post any ques­tions or com­ments below!  I’d love to hear how you get into action to get out of Stress!! ~Makenzie

“How do you do it all Maken­zie?  You must be so busy!!”

I hear this all the time when I encounter peo­ple.  Work­ing on two busi­nesses from home, tak­ing care of my hus­band (whom I might add is recov­er­ing quite nicely and doing a great job at this point of tak­ing care of him­self!), and shut­tling the kids to and from school.  Home­work, base­ball, play dates, lunches, din­ner etc…!

It doesn’t really seem that over­whelm­ing when I am going through my day–well most days.

A LifeHacker’s Views on Time Management

It all starts with my morn­ing, I am not a morn­ing per­son typ­i­cally, so I “roll” out of bed around 0730, pray­ing that my hus­band has been able to make his way to the kitchen before me to put on my morn­ing “heaven” (aka cof­fee.)  Morn­ing really sets the tone for the rest of the day for me.  This is the part of the day that I have to really be present, to focus my ener­gies, to align with the stars, to regain my Chi.…and ALL of it!  Because if I ALLOW my morn­ing to go bad, then quite fre­quently I have a hard time get­ting in front of my day.

The con­cept of Time is a funny one to me, because some days just seem to go by so quickly and some are a mean­ing­less mess and drag out for­ever!  Yet, Time always Feels in my favor, when I have a chance to get my energy AHEAD of TIME.  Makes sense or no?  If I can be present in the NOW, slow down my “reac­tion speeds” and work on my “proac­tion” speed, then it seems like Time is on my side.  ProAc­tiv­ity vs. ReActivity

Of course part of this proac­tion speed is defin­ing my day! I define my day on sev­eral levels.

1. How do I want to FEEL today? What do I want my energy to be like?  Do I want to be a pissed off, angry mom?  Or do I want to be a happy, joy­ful, peace­ful, fun mom?  (I choose the lat­ter because it is more fun!)
2. What do I want to DO today? And for some this seems like a ridicu­lous ques­tion because you HAVE to do so many things.  So let me point you back to the idea of Proac­tion…  When you choose to do some­thing, you allow your­self to feel proac­tive, it’s your choice, it’s your deci­sion! Yay!  When you feel that you HAVE to do some­thing, you’re react­ing to out­side influence…and well 99.999% of the time you’re the only one that can make the choice for YOU!!  So are you being respon­si­ble for your choice, or are you giv­ing up your power of choice?  Think on this for a lit­tle while.…
3. What do I want to BE? This can be such a broad state­ment, but often I chose to be inspired, to be fun, to be happy!!  I also chose to BE a MOM, to be an Entre­pre­neur, to be a Run­ner.…  I get to choose these things every­day!  What do you choose?

A few sim­ple steps to align your Mind with Clar­ity and good energy will allow you to get ahead of TIME!

(PS — I also do this trick, that was rec­om­mended by Zig Ziglar that on days when I roll out of bed and feel just cruddy, I jump up and down 10 times, laugh and say “This is the best day of my life!” “This is the best day of my life!”.…then I look in the mir­ror and say “I’m talk­ing to you–turn that frown upside down!”  It is so ridicu­lous, but it’s a fan­tas­tic pat­tern inter­rupt!  Works!!)

I don’t know if you rec­og­nize that a lot of my posts are about get­ting your MIND and your ENERGY in the right spot.  Lit­tle of it has to do with how much time or effort I put into cer­tain tasks.  I used to be that very task focused-driven person.…but it didn’t work for me, I was a mis­er­able mess!  So I had to try some­thing dif­fer­ent.  Focus­ing on my thoughts before focus­ing on my actions was the BIGGEST dif­fer­ence.  IT works…no bull­shit here!

Two more “No Bull­shit” Life­Hacker Tips:

The best Wheat Bread on this Side of the Mississippi:

This is the EASIEST bread recipe I have found.  You have to do it 2 or 3 times until you find the rou­tine, and you will be ask­ing why you spend so much on bread at the store!!

1. 1 cup warm water
2. 1 Table­spoon Milk
3. 2 Table­spoons oil
4. 3 Table­spoons Honey (I usu­ally add more!)
5. 2 Table­spoons Brown Sugar ( I some­times sub­sti­tute Molasses)
6. 1 tea­spoon Salt
7. 1–1/2 cups all-purpose flour
8. 1–1/2 cups whole wheat flour
9. 2 tea­spoons instant active dry yeast.

1. Com­bine Ingre­di­ents #1-#6 in a large mix­ing bowl, stir.

2. Add flours and yeast, and knead (turn on the kitchenaid mixer) for 10–15 min­utes.  Dough should be smooth and elas­tic.  Place dough in a greased bowl, turn­ing once to grease top.  Cover with plas­tic wrap, let rise in warm area (usu­ally above the refridger­a­tor or oven works well.)

3. Punch down dough; knead for a few min­utes until smooth then form into a loaf.  Place in a greased loaf pan and cover.  Let rise again until dou­bled, about 30 min.

4. Bake at 350 for 30–25 min­utes.  Remove when done and allow to rest in pan just for a few min­utes (any longer and it starts to sweat!)  Easy peasy!  Enjoy!

HOMEWORK!!

I don’t know about you, but my biggest bat­tle with home­work is try­ing to just get it done!!  How many times have I asked him?  Is it done yet?  Finally I was exas­per­ated by my attempts to fin­ish it the night before it was due (for us, it’s a Wednes­day!) and I thought, well, I will do what many com­pa­nies do when they want the job done ahead of schedule…factor in BONUSES!!

So his home­work sched­ule looks like this:

Home­work comes home on Fri­day due on Thursday.

If it’s com­plete by Mon­day — $3 bonus.…

If it’s com­plete by Tues­day — $2 bonus.…

If it’s com­plete by Wednes­day $0!!!

Why $0 on Wednes­day? The goal was to get him to com­plete his home­work before crunch time, so now he’s self-motivated to com­plete his home­work on Mon­day or Tues­day.  He doesn’t have to do it over the week­end, and he gets to choose when he wants to do it.  Either choice has an impact, but it’s ulti­mately his choice!!

Thanks to all of my read­ers who so gra­ciously fol­low along with my posts!  You inspire me every­day to make great posts!  Feel free to drop me a line and make com­ments!!  Many Adven­tures to You! ~Makenzie

In a pre­vi­ous post, I dis­cussed my fer­vent pas­sion about pro­tect­ing my time after I real­ized that our time here is so lim­ited.  And as we go into the New Year, I plan to fur­ther empha­size how impor­tant I really feel like this idea is.

I first wanted to share a life les­son that I encoun­tered early.  I know that most peo­ple have expe­ri­enced friends or fam­ily mem­bers that have passed away at some point in their life and I have too.  But one per­son that affected me greatly, was a per­son that I didn’t even know.

A Hard Les­son at 21

I was 21, and it was Thanksgiving-eve.  It was another shift on my para­medic intern­ship, and I was respond­ing to a call for a “man down”.  We got these calls occa­sion­ally, and usu­ally it was a tran­sient passed out on the cor­ner.  This call was about 11:30 in the evening and it was rain­ing and cold out­side.  The call was for a man down in the street.  We drove around in cir­cles for close to 15 min­utes at the loca­tion of the described area.  We couldn’t find him.  Then we saw a bystander wav­ing us down.

In the mid­dle of the street there was a young man, face down, he appeared have been skate­board­ing and fell.  He didn’t appear injured except that he was not respond­ing and his breath­ing was very irreg­u­lar, he also was lay­ing in a pool of vomit.  We had to put a breath­ing tube into this throat to help him breathe bet­ter, bystanders said he had a dog with him and was walk­ing his dog.

We did what we could med­ically to help him and trans­ported him to the near­est trauma room.  He died later of a mas­sive brain injury.  He was 25.  My fiance (soon to be hus­band) at the time was 25 too…they looked the same. That really both­ered me.  I don’t even remem­ber the man’s name.

You don’t expect at first to be asked to try save some­one your age when you are that young (and fail).  For me, still in my early for­ma­tive years, it was a hard and fast les­son:  LIFE IS SHORT.

Up to then, I had only seen old faces pass away. Since then, I have seen faces of all ages leave.

Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, so I am giv­ing away my age with this post, but that’s okay.  I already told every­one I was about 12 pounds over­weight in the prior post!

I really wanted to share with every­one how excep­tion­ally excited I am to have Retired!  I guess I like to use the term Retire because it really epit­o­mizes the mind­set that I have taken regard­ing my new life transition.

Some define retire as:

To with­draw from one’s occu­pa­tion, busi­ness, or office

To fall back or retreat, as from battle

To move back or away; recede.

I have def­i­nitely withdrawn.…

I moved back or almost like the tide, I’ve receded.    Yet, I really enjoy the sec­ond def­i­n­i­tion, as I’ve fallen back or retreated as from bat­tle! Wow!  I def­i­nitely felt like I was in a los­ing TIME bat­tle, and with the deci­sion to fall back, I have regained my Life! Decid­ing not to con­tinue to fight the bat­tle doesn’t always mean you lose.  Some­times you find out that you’re only bat­tling your­self, you are your worst enemy in some situations.

Retir­ing young DOES NOT mean:

Well what the heck do I mean then?

This type of retire­ment stinks

How DID I retire at 33?

I may get an ear­ful about this post from my par­ents, but I have been doing a lot of think­ing about this sub­ject lately.  Maybe I am an anti-conformist.  Maybe I just really don’t like rules (okay I don’t like rules).  But for some rea­son, I have a really hard time send­ing my kid to school every­day when I know that he may be wast­ing his time. 

Gasp!  I know.  I can’t believe I am say­ing this.  I really do believe that my son is smart, and at the same time, he does need guid­ance and a good “edu­ca­tion”.  Some­times I ask myself what type of edu­ca­tion he is get­ting in school. 

The pub­lic schools of Cal­i­for­nia rank 47th among the nation in spend­ing and get a respec­tive “D” for aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment.  Wow, he may learn more if I just drop him off at the local McDon­alds everyday. 

But it is not just the Cal­i­for­nia schools that aren’t teach­ing our kids.  I think as par­ents we get trapped into think­ing that our chil­dren learn every­thing they need to at school.  But in, fact they do not. 

How are we to teach our kids about the love of adven­ture, about finan­cial inde­pen­dence, about being cre­ative and cre­at­ing a liv­ing for them­selves?  School will not teach that.  In fact, I never learned a thing about finance until I was well into college. 

Finan­cial inde­pen­dence and how to cre­ate money is def­i­nitely not taught in school.  In fact one of my friends keyed it well when he said, “The only thing school teaches our kids, is how to be good workers.” 

Well, there is a much val­ued need for good work­ers.  But shall I doom my chil­dren to the rat race before they even have a chance?  Send them to school from 8 to 3, fill out the forms, get good grades, only to find out that they didn’t learn all the other needed skills? 

It is no won­der why there are more than 1 Mil home­schooled chil­dren in Amer­ica.  And as more and more are study­ing the impact of home­schooled chil­dren, they are find­ing that home­school­ers are more moti­vated, smarter and grad­u­ate ear­lier than their respec­tive peers. 

I had the oppor­tu­nity to meet one such home­schooled woman the other day.  She fin­ished high school at 16!  She gained an aver­age of 2 years to live her life and do what she wanted by tak­ing this route.

When time is such a pre­cious com­modi­tiy, as I believe it is, is it pos­si­ble school, the way it is now,  is just a waste of time?