Cara Harvey 00:00:03 Welcome to the Purpose Driven Moms show here at A Purpose Driven Mom, we believe that it’s possible to manage your home, work on your personal goals, and grow and scale an online business. Most productivity tips out there tell you to hustle more and make you feel shame about not being motivated enough. And we’re here to dispel this myth. I’m Kara Harvey, and I am on a mission to help work at home. Moms realize that they have the power to go after their dreams, take care of themselves, and manage their home without perfectionism, guilt, or having to sacrifice their sleep. If you’re ready to shift your thinking around productivity and get some practical tips to help you manage your mom life. Toss your earbuds in while you fold the laundry. And let’s do this! Welcome to the Pressure Moms Show, episode 462. Today, I’m going to give you a behind the scenes and some tips on my three month reset plan. This is summer goals for me, my family, and my business. Summer is here.

Cara Harvey 00:00:56 The week that this launches is my kid’s last week of school. So the school year is just about to be over and I’m so excited. Things are starting to feel different right now. Your kids might be in school already, depending on where you live, or they might not be out yet. So take this and edit it and adjust it for how you need. But now is the perfect time for a personal reset. I just got off a call with one of my team members, and we were just saying how like, I cannot wait to get to summer, but I feel like I’m never gonna get to summer, right? Maybe you feel that way, too. There’s so much on your plate, which is why we put our focus on our May Summer challenge, because there’s just so much that we are required to do. There’s so much we have to do. There’s just a lot that us moms hold. And so the summer is just a great time to reset. I’ll share some personal stories today on how I am feeling, like I’m hitting kind of a bit of an actual burnout just in my personal life right now.

Cara Harvey 00:01:47 What I’m getting off my plate so that I can take a couple breaths, and how I’m also going to still, you know, maintain the status quo around here as mom, as a friend, as a daughter and my business and all those things. Show notes will be at a Purpose Driven mom.com/podcast 462. Let’s start with your personal reset. I want you to go through these questions as I’m talking today, as I’m sharing with you two things and ask yourself, how can I apply this for me? I want this summer to be a focus for me on rest, on getting my energy back, my own personal growth and development and connection with myself because I feel like I’ve lost that a little bit. I want you to ask yourself, what did this last season, or these first 5 or 6 months of the year cost you mentally, emotionally or physically? I am pretty drained. I’m not gonna even pretend that that’s not what’s happening. We had a lot happening in my family health wise. There was a lot of mental load and unpacking.

Cara Harvey 00:02:46 I was able to hit up appointments with my therapist maybe two times a month, but it just wasn’t enough. So it really kind of was more for me to recenter myself before going in the week. Same with church. I was able to hit it up like two times a month, but we just had so much going on. This was our first full season in competitive cheer on top of Girl Scout cookie season, on top of 8000 other things I felt like I was doing. There was not a lot of space for me. Now I did my basics right. I teach a planning system 15 minutes a day on your goals, 15 minutes a day on a habit and 15 minutes a day on learning. I’ll say that I hit that pretty much five out of seven days. I felt really good about those things, but what I learned in reflection was that bare minimum of showing up for my goals is not enough. To really is not enough to fuel me. Now, I always say like, you deserve more than the 45 minutes, like those three 15 minute blocks.

Cara Harvey 00:03:37 But there are busy seasons in our life like this one was for me, where that’s all I got most days. And it actually wasn’t enough. Like, I know that I need more downtime, more pause time, and it did cost me a lot. I feel like I lost a lot of confidence this first half of the year because I felt more frazzled than I felt. I don’t know what it is about. I don’t know if it was like the mental load of getting ready to have a, you know, a high school graduate, plus the small people, the amount of things on my plate. I did volunteer more this first half of the year. I picked up two different volunteering positions that I hadn’t had in 2024, and I think that that might have just been too much. And I hate to admit that, but sometimes we have to write. Sometimes we have to admit, like some of this stuff, even if it’s fun, even if it’s enjoyable, cost me a little bit. Now, one of the things I’m proud of, and I want you to think about the things you’re proud of doing for yourself, is I did keep my exercise up, my emotional eating.

Cara Harvey 00:04:35 I struggle a lot with emotional and binge eating. Not good right? Not good. This year I definitely fed my feelings with food, but I maintain I’ve lost about £5 since the year started, which feels so small. But I have to remind myself that like, I had a lot going on and I did the best that I could. I still kept a lot of really good habits. I still drank my water every day. I still got my exercise in I own, I hit my protein a lot of days. Right. and that made me feel good. But on the days where I wasn’t fueling myself the way that I needed to fuel myself, I could feel it right. On the days that I was leaning towards a sugary treat verse. Let me just take a walk outside. I felt the difference. My body does not feel good. And so I want you to think, what was it like for you? If you were a mom who wants to start a business and you need help, and you want to go from chaos to clarity, I want you to go over to a Purpose Driven Mom business planner and get my new Ultimate Digital planner for business owners.

Cara Harvey 00:05:39 I’ve got client profile pages, business breakdowns, promo planners, goal setting, social media, and more. You can take that overwhelm that is planning your business and get all of it in one place. You can make a binder, get your things together, and get on track with your business. I’ve got 13 different planning worksheets you can choose from goal setting sheets, project planning, product planning, client profiles, financial templates, and more. Go to a Supermom Planner and you can also get this bonus social media content pages, where there are over 20 different options for you to lay out your social media and get it done. Go to a purpose driven Rom-com planner and grab yours today. I also can tell when I’m in a state of stress. When I’m not reading for personal growth. I know what it is. It just came to me. As I’m reflecting, the world feels like it’s imploding. I was like, why am I so stressed out this year? And then if you live in the United States, maybe you’re feeling it too.

Cara Harvey 00:06:40 I’m exhausted. I am exhausted with the state of things right now in our country, and it is very anxiety producing. There we go. I was wondering this that literally just came to me like as I was talking, like, why am I so much more stressed? Ding ding ding. I think we know the answer, right? And so what did I do to contribute to that? I doom scrolled a lot. And I know that that is not healthy right. My anxiety again through the roof wondering about what next what next. Right. And so I think that because I was on my phone more because I was so busy, I wasn’t doing a lot of the things that are more than just the 15 minutes a day for myself. I wasn’t reading for fun. I wasn’t outside as much as I wanted to. I was either I would get to the end of the day and like, mildly disassociate where I’m just like staring at the wall or like, let me veg out and watch a TV episode or something like that.

Cara Harvey 00:07:34 That doesn’t make me feel good as a person. I can tell that my energy is low when those are the things that I’m doing. So what do we do with that? We ask ourselves a couple questions. Okay, so I want you to think through a couple questions. What do I need more of this summer? I need more time outside. I need less time on my phone. Right? I need more time reading books and more time of just having nothing on the schedule. I know it right. What do you want to feel at the end of August? Oh, I need not want. I need to feel refreshed. I need to feel excited. Not so much to, like, get back to the grind, but I need to feel rejuvenated. I don’t feel very energized right now when it comes to a lot of things, and I need to reclaim that. And then what do you want to let go of to make space for that? For me. We’re letting go of activities so my kids don’t do activities in the summer.

Cara Harvey 00:08:26 Besides, like a la carte, my daughter might do like a tumbling every once in a while that they have. But maybe it’s not. Every week we go on more trips so we don’t commit to a sport we might go to. You know, they’ll go to a couple camps for sports, but we don’t do like it’s baseball right now. So my son does baseball every, you know, three times a week. We don’t do that. We’re not going to do that in the summer. So we need to let go of those activities. And I it’s so easy for me to be like, oh, I just want to fill the schedule. Like, I hate looking at like that schedule. I’m like, oh, but we should do something. No, we should not. Kara. No, we should not do anything. And then I also need to let go of the phone. I know that a lot of my stress right now is the phone is phone related. So I need to let go of the phone so that I can make space for what I need.

Cara Harvey 00:09:07 I want you to think of some things you could reset for yourself, maybe making some non-negotiable time blocks for yourself. I also know in reflection and I’m doing this reflection live, by the way. So you and me are just going to hang out and I’m gonna really have a lot of aha’s, but I realize I haven’t been getting up early enough. My body is so exhausted by the time I get to the end of the day, because I’m not doing the self-care things that I need because I’m here it is. I’m staying up late doomscrolling, and it’s making me more anxious about the state of the world every single night. Therefore, I’m not getting around. I’m just gonna be real. I’m not getting a good night’s sleep. So I’m getting up six, 630 instead of 536. That half hour matters, right? So I need to make that, you know, maybe I’m not going to get up as early in the summer, but I need to make sure I’m giving myself that morning time. I also want to make sure I’m making reading and creative goals.

Cara Harvey 00:09:55 I want to do crafts, and I want to be in my garden, and I want to go do things that are fun, just for fun. Like my son’s working on this puzzle. It’s pretty tricky for him, right? So it’s like taking over our entire kitchen. And I keep looking at it and I keep thinking, oh, I just want to sit down and work on the puzzle. Go work on the puzzle, Kara. Just go work on the puzzle. Right? But my brain is in triage and my brain is like, no, I gotta do this, and I gotta do that. I want to work on puzzles, dang it, and play games. And like me, maybe you also want to have, some phone boundaries or a little bit of a digital detox. I think it’s going to be really good for me. I’m excited for us to go on our trips and go camping and stuff, because when we go camping, I, I’m like, not even on my phone.

Cara Harvey 00:10:32 I don’t even know where it is. we’re going away this week that I’m recording this. Actually, tonight we’re going to Florida for the week for cheer. I’m recording this early May. No. Yes. Today’s April 30th. I’m recording this early because I’m batching. So if you’ve listened to episodes that have been going on prior, this is one of my strategies to enjoy my summer a little bit. That I’ll talk about it a little bit is is batching, but when I go away with my family, I go away with my family. I’m not on my phone. Text me later. I’ll see you. Right? So sometimes having those breaks in your routine where you’re not just in the same everyday activities can help you reset as well. So call to action. I want you to write down two of your intentions for the summer for your personal reset. Take care of yourself. And again, I’m talking to myself here. I need to take better care of myself right now because I feel myself struggling.

Cara Harvey 00:11:19 I really do. Like I said to my husband, like this morning, I’m like, I’m not okay. Like I do not feel well mentally, like I know that I’m not okay. And he’s like, it’ll be really good for us. We’re gonna go away this week. It’s going to be and again, like, we’re going away for cheer. So there’s a lot happening, you know? But it will be nice to just like get away for a little bit. All right. So personal reflection. Check. Let’s talk about a little family reset. All right. Togetherness. Fun, right. We still want to have those things. And I want to have some rhythms. I want to have some structure that supports everyone so that I can enjoy my summer, too. And mom isn’t doing everything okay. The little mindset we’re going to start with here is that summer doesn’t need to be packed to be meaningful. And I talked a lot about this on last week’s episode as well. Let it go.

Cara Harvey 00:12:07 It’s okay to let go of some things. I want you to ask yourself similar questions as you did for the personal section. What has it felt like for you? Like what has has been kind of taken from your family because of the busy season, our game nights, our time together. Like, I feel like it is feeling for me personally, if I’m honest, like a little bit of a chore and not as much enjoyment to like spend time with my kids. And I hate that feeling. I love spending time with my kids. I love playing games with them. I love being with them. But when I’m so exhausted in other parts of my life, that feels like too much for me. So I want you to think about your summer, okay? Ask yourself some questions. What do you want the days to feel like? Okay. I want my days to not just be no routines at all. Like, I’m not like, let’s get dressed in the morning and brush our teeth type of things.

Cara Harvey 00:12:59 Now, maybe we’ll have a pajama day every once in a while. But let’s get dressed. Let’s make sure we’re cleaning up our plates like I need basic rhythms in our home for it to flow. It doesn’t have to be super structured, right? But because everyone’s going to be home more. I know that we need basic rhythms, but I want us to have a lighter schedule. Now, I say that with the caveat is of my kids are doing camps so my kids will be at camps with breaks in between. I think we end school this week that this is coming out. Then my kids go right into two weeks of camp, then they have two weeks off, then they go into two weeks of camp and then they have, I think, the rest of the summer off, I have to look at the actual schedule and then they have three weeks off. So we kind of go back and forth. But I want us to be lighter. I want there to be more joy. I want the days to feel really fun.

Cara Harvey 00:13:51 Take a quick second. I want to invite you to join one of my new favorite apps. It’s called Brand Club. I am all about trying to get my side hustle on right. And one of the things I hate doing is taking money out of my pre-planned budget for tiny things that pop up, like the snack stand during football season, or the $10 you have to Venmo somewhere else because you need it for school. And I found Brand Club to literally fill that gap for me. Here’s what I do with it. Every single day I go in, I earn between a dollar and $1.50. It takes me two minutes and I just fill in some surveys. Super simple. Very easy. I also will link it to my Amazon, my Walmart and my target account. So when I buy things anyway, I get cash back. It takes me about ten days, but I earn $10 and when I get my $10, I cash it to my Venmo girl math. I’m using it all the places I want to share with you a $3 code to get started, because you need $10 to cash out.

Cara Harvey 00:14:35 So let me give you $3. I’ll get $3 if you sign up. I really appreciate it. Go to a purpose to your mom club. Do it on your phone because it’s going to bring you up to the app so you can download it. It’s a really easy way to just get some side money going, so you don’t have to take it out of your regular budget and make some money for yourself. That’s a purpose driven mom club. Now we also have a pool. I want to spend time at this pool. I want to read my book. I want to relax with my kids. I need that right now like I desperately need it. So I want you to think about what do you want it to feel like. I also want to have more one on one time with my kids I’ve shared before. Like, one of the things I’ll do is I take a lap around my block where it takes about 15 minutes. That’s like my brain reset. And after I come back with one lap, which is like a little under a mile, I might pick up one of my kids and I’m like, hey, do you want to take the second lap with me? Right? My husband’s home with the other ones.

Cara Harvey 00:15:27 So we take a lap and then I’ll take the third one. So then I’m getting some exercise in and I’m getting one on one time with my kids. So think about that. How can I build in connection with my kids without it feeling like another thing? For me, it’s those walks, the games, things like that. I also want you to think about resetting routines, resetting some structures that might have gotten kind of sloppy as the year ended. And ask yourself, what rhythms do we need for the summer? Okay. You are not going to be able to enjoy your summer if you’re still in micromanaging mode over every routine. If I’m still in the mode where mom does everything and I’m telling you I lost it on my son. Not my best parenting moment this morning because I asked him to put his homework in his folder. It was on the table still from last night because we didn’t do a reset and he was like, well, you always do it for me. And I, like, lost my mind.

Cara Harvey 00:16:20 And then I was like, I have been doing it for you. Like I have, I created the problem. So maybe asking yourself what kind of independent goals, independent tasks do you want your kids to do and make goals around them, right? That’s going to help you have more joy and enjoy things as well. And then I also want you to think about a tradition or something you might want to start or continue. From last summer to this summer, we went on our first camping trip last year, tent camping. It was amazing. We’d never been camping. If we do not go camping this summer for a couple of days, I will be so sad. And I’m not gonna even lie, I have nothing planned. I keep saying I want it to happen. I don’t want us to do it, but if I don’t get it on the counter and thankfully this is one of my talking points. I have a list for the car ride for driving 14 hours tonight for my husband is. We need to look at the calendar and pick dates to go camping because it’s just I don’t want to miss that tradition, right? I want it to still be there for us.

Cara Harvey 00:17:13 So go ahead, make a list of your family, you know, summer bucket list. Ask your kids what they want, but also go through and say, what are some flows that I know that I need? Okay, I want you to make 2 to 3 very simple goals for your family this season. I know mine are a weekly hike. Mine are also going to be one on one time with my kids, and the other one is I actually want to go through and help them with some of their routines to get a little more independent, like they used to do their own laundry. And then I took it over because it was easier. So my goal is actually to get them back on some of their independent routines so that the school year they can take on more. All right. It’s business reset. Let’s go to section three. Right. We talked about ourselves. We talked about our family. Let’s talk about our business. The third part of this episode which is goals for the business the summer I don’t know what your business looks like in the summer.

Cara Harvey 00:18:03 I work differently in the summer. But I want to be so intentional. I, I have work calls every single day but Thursdays okay, one hour most days. So Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, it’s only a one hour call. And then on Mondays I’m in calls for about three hours. Okay, that’s like the bulk of my work time, but I want to use this time. I’m hoping my brain will open up a little. To work on some new projects, right? I want to have sustainable momentum. I want to have creative space. And I want to be intentional. And I also want to plan for the back to school year, which is a big time of the year for us here at APM, and wild to think about it. But holiday planning, right? My approach is that summer is going to have a lighter energy, but it’s still going to be focused. Okay. So I want you to ask yourself what can you maintain or prep rather than maybe working on a new project this summer? Now you might want to work on a new project for me.

Cara Harvey 00:19:01 My goal right now in May, April and May, is to batch content so that during the times that I can work in the summer, I have free brain space from my day to day tasks at work, like the podcast, to work on projects I haven’t been able to work on a lot of projects this year because I feel like very in the day to day tasks, I haven’t been able to like, quote unquote, get ahead. So for me, I know that because that’s what I want to do. I am batching. Again I mentioned this is it’s April 30th today. This episode comes out I think June 9th. Right. I’m getting as much done in advance. I won’t have it all done. My goal is to do four episodes this week. We’re leaving tonight for Florida. I don’t think I’m gonna get another one done. Maybe I will, but at least I’m ahead enough. I also want you to think about having some lighter work weeks to make sure you’re also giving yourself a true vacation from your business if you work from home.

Cara Harvey 00:19:51 We normally go to the lake in the summer with my sister. We’re not doing that this year. She’s having a baby around the time, so that week for me is always like, I don’t work at all. So now that I know that that week isn’t happening, I want to make sure that I’m planning for myself. Time off. Time off. It’s so important when you work from home, when you have your own business, it’s hard to give yourself time off. So I need to make sure that I can plan those things. The other thing that I would highly suggest is maybe coming up with either a new lead magnet, a freebie, a passive funnel, something that can help you make money right when you’re not launching things like that. Like we have my membership, so I get paid for that, you know, like monthly. And then I have a couple funnels on my email system. I have some freebies I send out that go to what’s called a tripwire, where I can send another offer.

Cara Harvey 00:20:36 So it does help me make money almost every single day. That’s the kind of thing you want to work on if you don’t have that. I would really recommend you working on it in the summer. So here’s some questions to ask yourself. What feels heavy in your business right now? Right. For me, it’s working on my funnels. I got one done, and my plan was to have all of mine done before the summer so that I could have this lighter summer. They’re not done, so they feel very heavy to me right now. Once you know that, ask yourself, do I still want to hold that heavy thing for the summer? Or am I ready to let it go for me? I’m not ready to let it go. I want to push forward, but maybe it might be time to bless and release it. Where can you automate, delegate, or pause things for the summer? Are there things that you typically do that you’re like, I’m ready to take a pause on this, okay.

Cara Harvey 00:21:22 It’s okay to pause things. A lot of podcasters, for example, pause in the summer. They re-air podcasts. We might be doing that at this moment. We’re not doing that. But I might do that at some point, right? We re-air our best of episodes. We give ourselves a break as well. So are there places you can automate that? You can delegate that. You can pause and then ask yourself, what is one thing I want to have done by August? So that can be your number one focus goal for your business? Do you want to start your own podcast? Break it down now so that you’re like, this is the one thing when I have work time I’m going to work on. All right. So this summer you got you you got your family. You got your business. This is a reset for you. It’s not reinvention. Our goal is not to like, let’s invent a hundred things. It’s simplicity over pressure. It’s putting things back on track that may have gotten off track.

Cara Harvey 00:22:12 I want to encourage you today. Take 15 minutes to just start answering some of these questions, writing out your plan and ask yourself like, what is something I want to shift? What is something I want to nurture? What is something I want to create? What is something I want to do? What is something I want to take off my plate? Really ask yourself so that you can also have a reset. Because moms, we deserve it too. Show notes are a purpose driven romcom podcast for 62. I’d love to see what you’re resetting. Send me a DM over at A Purpose Driven Mom on all the socials. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Purpose Driven Mom Show. If this episode served you in any way, we would really appreciate it if you headed over to wherever you listen to podcast. Hit that five star and leave a review and a rating. That’s how more moms can find us and we can grow our community. If you had a tip or an Make sure you come over and tag me at a Purpose Driven Mom on Instagram and share it with your friends.

Cara Harvey 00:23:01 The best way for us to get this message out there of less hustle and less shame and more intentionality, is for you to share it with people you know need to hear it. Thanks for listening. We appreciate you and I can’t wait to connect with you more outside of the podcast.