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 in 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 Purpose Driven Mom Show, episode 471. It is August, and we have just wrapped up our back to school planning workshop that we did. And I know what you’re thinking it’s still summer, but for some of us it’s not.

Cara Harvey 00:00:57 Now my kids go back to school the last week in August, and we have people in the mom community where their kids are already back at school, and then where I grew up in new Jersey. You don’t go back to school until after Labor Day. So I know that this time of year can feel all over the place because you’re half in summer, half out. That’s kind of how I feel right now. Okay, so I’m recording this and it’s still June because I am batching ahead because my kids are. They have a couple more weeks of camp and then they’re done and will be home. So I’m trying to record all my episodes early summer so that I can be more present with them. That’s kind of, you know, the point of it all. And I’m getting these ones done. But it’s June. Thinking ahead to mid-August. I am already not looking forward to going back to school. I said it yesterday on our mom club call. We have a lot of homeschool moms in our community and it just sounds so aligned for me.

Cara Harvey 00:01:47 I just want more time with my kids. I just want to have more flexibility and freedom. I want them to be challenged, so who knows where things are going to go. But summer’s been great so far. again recording this. We’ve only had a few weeks of summer, but July looks like it’s going to be super fun. My kids have their final couple weeks of camp in July. We have a trip planned and then in August we are just back to back trips. So like I said, the day this goes out, I think we’re leaving tomorrow to go down to Atlanta to take my oldest to college. We just got back from a camping trip and we’re hopefully going on another one next week, so I’m not ready to get into my back to school mindset. But here’s the thing. After we get back from that final trip of the summer, my kids go to school Monday and I have to get there. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about using this back to school mindset on your own personal goals, and how you can use it to kind of recharge things.

Cara Harvey 00:02:41 Just like the kids are getting ready for a new year, they’re excited. They’re ready to learn and grow and see their friends and have new teachers. Like, we can do the same thing when it comes to our goals. Are you looking to spend intentional time with your kid and have no idea where it’s going to fit in? Let me help you out. I just made an activity book called draw with mom, and the purpose of this book is to give you intentional time with your kid. That doesn’t have to take hours. I’m going to be real. I don’t want to play for hours at all. I also don’t want to play dolls and have you tell me how I’m doing it wrong. I made this book to be an interactive journal so that you could be creative, your kid could be creative, and you can have fun together. There’s 50 prompts that are set up for you, where the child draws on one side and you add to it. Yesterday, my son and I did it and it was draw a house and then it said the parent to draw a rainbow and a son.

Cara Harvey 00:03:30 And we’re super creative. We make up stories, we draw outside the box. We don’t have to stick to the prompts, but the goal is sometimes it’s always the start that stops us. I want to spend intentional time with my kid and I don’t know what to do. I’ve made a plan for you. You can go to a purpose driven mom, draw with mom, or just search on Amazon to grab the book. Now it’s 1995. It’s a great way to be intentional about your one on one time and spend time with your kid. That’s a purpose driven mom. Draw with mom. I always say back to school season and New years, right? It’s like, those are the big those are our Super Bowls for us moms because we’re resetting our routines and we’re getting started for things. So the back to school mindset is one that we can have. And it’s that same excitement we get in January, right? It’s that same excitement we get when we’re optimistic. We’re like, I can do all these things I have all this time, or I don’t have all this time, but I have a plan.

Cara Harvey 00:04:28 It’s a clean slate. These are my brand new goals, and it’s a time where we tend to have more energy. It’s a time where we’re a lot more intentional. Again, the new Sharpen pencil is the back to school clothes. You know, I don’t always get my kids new backpacks unless they’re actually broken. But some you know, but what if they get a new backpack? It’s exciting. The new planner, right. We want to take new planner energy for ourselves as well. And it’s not just about getting the kids excited. It’s about resetting your routines post summer. So no matter when your kids are going back to school, if you still have a couple weeks like I do when this comes out. Right. So I’ll have two weeks after this comes out before my kids go back to school. This is a great time to start to slowly get them ready for back to school, to start to get everyone to bed a little bit earlier. We are summer bedtime people, right? My kids go to bed a lot later.

Cara Harvey 00:05:16 We’re out swimming till 9:00 at night. We’re down by the fire pit. I mean, it’s just so nice. Like that summer mentality is nice, and there’s a lot of things I want to take from my summer mentality. I feel like Summer. Cara, she. We like to call her nature. Cara. She’s outside, we’re hiking, we’re sitting by the fire pit. We’re camping. I’m just more relaxed. So there’s pieces of that that I want to take into my year. But then there’s pieces of Back to School Cara that summer Cara needs, right? A little bit more structure now. I have structure in my summer, okay. We have time blocks. We do things because I still have to work. I still want to work on some of my goals, even the fun ones. My goal this week was to finish my book I did last night. Right? Like I still have structure and flow and rhythms, but I want to take that sparked energy into September. Okay. We often will lose momentum.

Cara Harvey 00:06:02 Kind of like midyear, right? Like once the school year ends, it’s May June, halfway through the year. Right. Summer disrupts that. So maybe you’ve gotten your routines down. Maybe you were doing great on some of your goals. I hear this from a lot of the moms in the club. And again, if you want to check out the club, you can go to a purpose Driven Mom pass. You can get a $10 pass to just come hang out at one of our calls, see what it’s like, and get coaching and support. It’s a new thing that we’ve decided to do this summer. It’s been very fun to get to meet some new people. We have co-working calls where you can just get help, you know, to work on things like this in your goals or coaching, if you want accountability, if you’re stuck on something. So again, go to a purpose driven mom to check that out. But here’s the thing. A lot of the moms that I talked to, they’re like, you know, I was doing great on my goals and I’m struggling now that summer is here.

Cara Harvey 00:06:45 I don’t know how to find time to get things in, and this is hard for me as well. When my kids are home, it throws the whole routine off. Even this week that I’m recording this, my son is at baseball camp. Baseball camp starts at 830. Okay. We’re used to not school starting till nine. You might be like, oh, it’s a half hour, but mom’s. We know this half hour matters in the morning. So I have to shorten my workout. If you see me on the YouTube. On the YouTube. Oh my God. Sorry. My daughter’s new phrase is like, mom, everything you do is old timey. If I just called it the YouTube, she would say it was old timey. But if you see me on YouTube, my hair is still wet because I just showered. I’m just letting it air dry. Whereas before I like to be showered and ready to go so things get more relaxed. And I hear this from a lot of moms.

Cara Harvey 00:07:23 They struggle, right? They feel guilt of working on their own goals over the summer because their kids are home. They’re overwhelmed because we have a pool, right? So it’s just like beach towels everywhere and the nightly cleanup. And because we’re the house of the pool, we have a lot of friends kind of cycling in and out. I love it, right. But it’s a mess, right? Things can be messy. We feel a little bit disconnected because we don’t have as much quiet time. This is the hardest one for me. And I will say like in full transparency, the one thing that’s holding me back the most from homeschooling is the weeks. Like right now when I’m recording this, my kids are at both out of camp. My daughter is at a away camp, which I miss her so much. She does one we shall do this week in June, and then she’ll do a second week at the end of July. And I teared up today like I haven’t seen that many pictures of her.

Cara Harvey 00:08:04 My house is so quiet. Here’s the other thing. If you ever have kids, go away camp or to family, you notice which one is the kid, right? My house is so quiet because obviously my kids aren’t fighting. But also my daughter is a large personality, right? My house is like, not that messy. I’m noticing there’s so much less picking up that I have to do. I’m like, wait a minute. But anyway, these weeks were there at camp, like I’m getting work done. But next week after this, I have two weeks. You have two weeks where there are no camp where we call it mommy camp. We’re here. We’re going to hang out with friends. We’re gonna go to the beach. We’re going to go to the pool. We’re going to hang around the house. But mom still has to work. I don’t have two weeks off. This is what’s important, right? Is, like I tell my kids, like, I still work. I still have.

Cara Harvey 00:08:42 The only day off I have is Thursdays, where I don’t have any calls. I still have a call Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Somedays multiple calls, right? So mommy still has to work So there’s no quiet time. And that’s the one thing, if I’m honest again, with the homeschooling that, like, throws me a little bit of a loop is like, right now I enjoy this little bit of quiet space. And then when I pick my son up, I can be more present. We’ll see. Again, we’ll see, we’ll see. But I don’t know, I feel I feel a nudge. But I just want you to know. Like it happens to everyone. That our goals get thrown off midyear. Okay, it’s totally fine. But again, how are we to take this back to school energy? How are we going to take this back? Oh, and I didn’t say this, but show notes. You can either swipe up on your player or you can go to a Purpose Driven Mom podcast 471, or hang out with us on the YouTube if you would like to watch.

Cara Harvey 00:09:28 All right, so let’s reframe summer. It is not a setback. It is just a season. It is a season of relax. It is a season of fun, is a season of slow. And it is enjoyable. But how can we reignite our goals with this back to school mindset approach starting now? Whether your kids are starting school this week or not, I want you to do it now to give you five ways. One is resetting your routine. Right now, I want you to think about how you can rebuild your structure around the school schedule and start now. If you know that you want your kids. So this is something I’ve been doing all summer. I want my kids to be more independent and have a couple more jobs. Last year I was putting their book bags away. They would come home, I’d bring the book bags in, I’d empty the lunchboxes. I would do all that. I’m like, my kids can completely do this. They’re capable. So over the summer when they get back from camp, they’re in charge of book bags.

Cara Harvey 00:10:13 I’m also going to be adding in a few other things I want to make sure they’re doing making the bed, the laundry, etc. so if there are things that you want to make sure you’re doing, start it now with them. If you know that you want to get up in the morning to work out. Use that time now, okay? Start to rebuild your structure one time block at a time. Okay? And I want you to also just use those anchor points and those time blocks, the bus drop off. Right. Lunch pickup which can we talk about this real quick if you’re like me and you’ve let your kids stay up later, start shortening that time. My kids bedtime in the summer is 930 now. During the school year, my kids bedtime is nine. My son doesn’t always make it till nine, but we do sports and activities. By the time my daughter gets home from two. It’s 815. She still has to shower. She’s gonna eat something because she just was at the gym for 2.5 hours, right? Like.

Cara Harvey 00:10:58 And this year, I think I was looking at her. Practice time is still 830 now, so she used to get done practice at eight with her other team. And now with this team, it’s 830. You know, like that’s late for her. So yes, my kids go to bed kind of late, but I want to get back to nine. So what I’m going to do this week is instead of 930, I’m just gonna go 920, right. And then 910 and then 9:00. I’m just slowly getting them back in. And I’m also going to do the same in the morning with our wake ups on camp days. Obviously my kids have to get up at around school time. Camp normally starts 830 9:00, which is like school. We don’t take the bus so I don’t have to get up extra early for that. But on non camp days, which is where we’re at in August now, we don’t have to do that now. It’s also very challenging for us because we’ve got three back to back small trips planned, so that’ll throw everything off, but I’m going to try to get them up a little earlier now.

Cara Harvey 00:11:43 My son is easy peasy. My dude will get up at 6 a.m. like clockwork. I don’t have to worry, but it’s my daughter again. She’s the one. We’re dragging her out of bed. So I’m going to start setting some alarms. So think about what you want your structure to be for the school year and start with the routines. If you have an evening routine that you want to do, if you want to start calling stuff out. Pick one routine only this week and get started with it the way you would like it to be for school, whether school has started or not. I also want you to revisit the vision that you’ve made. Now. We make big goals, big plans. We do a lot of planning activities here, so if you haven’t written a vision for your year, it’s a great time to do it. But I always encourage people to, you know, make their vision for the year. They write out vision statements, things like that, reflect on that. What still matters, what is still important to you? What do you still want on your plate, and what are you ready to bless and release and just know you can bless and release.

Cara Harvey 00:12:32 You don’t have to hold on to every single goal. Just because you said you want to do something doesn’t mean you have to. I’m gonna give you an example of my gardening. Now. If you’ve been listening for a while, you’re gonna be like Karen. No, I bless and release the gardening. I wanted to get the garden up. I planted all my indoor seeds. I was ready and good to go. They died when we went away in early May. I never replanted, nothing ever got out there. The only thing I have out there now is lettuce. Because I planted it last year. It is what it is. I let it go. It is okay to bless and release certain things. Make a new vision board. For the second half of the year. I always, I don’t know when I break my year up into thirds instead of quarters. It works better for me as a mom. Quarters is like how businesses work. Thirds is how mom life works. January to summer break, summer break to school.

Cara Harvey 00:13:16 Starting school. Starting to winter break like it’s just a lot easier way to look at things. So make a third half of the year. I don’t know. That’s not the right way to say that. Make a last third vision board okay. Journal, do a refresh. What do you want and what do the kids want? Do it as a family. What are some things we want to do before the year ends? What are some areas we want to make sure we’re checking the box off? Go back to the goals that you set and ask yourself, are these still aligned and do I still want to work on them? I want to invite you over to grab a $10 club pass today. The purpose of your mom club has been around for almost five years now, and we know that sometimes it can be hard to commit to something like a membership, ongoing payments, and all of the times you feel like you have to show up. So this summer we came up with the club Pass, and we are continuing it into the fall.

Cara Harvey 00:14:02 For just $10. You can join any of our calls. We have planning calls every Sunday during the week. We have accountability calls where you can get coaching and laser focus, plan for what you want to work on. And we have a co-working which has been incredible for our members, where you literally show up with the tasks you want to get done, and we are that little kick in your booty to get it done. We are going to hold your hand as you complete the task. For only $10. You can join any of the calls and check out the purpose of your mom club. Go to a purpose driven Mom Pass and grab your pass today and I hope to see you on a call. All right. Number three is I want you to break it down. Just like school. Write report card style check ins for yourself. If you’ve never read the book. The 12 Week Year by Brian Moran. I’m spacing. I think that’s the right author. I really recommend it because it talks about instead of looking at the whole year at a time, it’s like, how can we kind of compartmentalize? So look at your last third.

Cara Harvey 00:15:00 What do you want your report card to be at the end? I want you to start creating little check marks and objectives. Now. I was a special education teacher for nine years. I have my master’s in education, but I was in the in reading. But I was in the classroom as a special education teacher. So IEPs progress monitoring. It’s all my jam, right? I want you to make yourself objectives, which is something that I like to do there, like monthly mini goal check ins. I always am checking in every week. How is my goal? Where am I at? The reason I’ve been able to stick with so many routines this year. I worked on a lot of routines and I’ve made them stick very well this year. And part of it is because I’ve been checking in weekly. I use Trello to do that, but check in on yourself every week. Every month, right? Think of it like a syllabus. Okay. School energy. Okay. What’s the steps? What are all the things? What are the tasks you need to do? What are the deadlines? Now here’s the thing, mom that I don’t think we do enough of is giving ourselves deadlines on our own personal goals.

Cara Harvey 00:15:54 We will often meet external deadlines easily. Right. Somebody needs something. For me, the paperwork is due. All those things. When it comes to stuff that we would like to do, the things we would like to do just for us. We don’t do it. We don’t put deadlines on it. We don’t give ourselves objectives. We just say we’ll do it one day and then everyone needs us. More things happen and one day becomes the next becomes next. Okay, I want you to break your goals down, and I want you to give yourself some mini weekly check ins. I also want you to create a little system or a workspace. Again, your kids have a desk. What do you have now if you’re homeschooling? I am curious what your setup looks like, but I’m sure you have something where kids do the school work, where the school supplies are, things like that. Do you have those things organized? Just a side note. Wait, we’re on YouTube, right? So I’m going to just turn the camera.

Cara Harvey 00:16:41 I think you can see. Let me make sure this is behind me. I’m showing my office, so if you’re on YouTube, you can kind of see it. There we go. Welcome back. This is how we keep our supplies organized. I will say a couple of things. One, I hired a professional organizer, a good friend of mine a few years ago, and she did this for me, too. It’s mostly my Girl Scout supplies, and my kids use it for their own supplies, so I won’t say like we don’t have literally like a michaels and a staples in my house like this, but it looks like we do. Do you have those things set up for yourself, not only for your kids. Do they have there? No, I gotta do homework. Where can I find the scissors type of a system? But what about you? If I’m doing my meal prep, what system do I have if I’m working on a goal for myself and it’s exercise, like this is also my gym.

Cara Harvey 00:17:24 So it’s like, do I have my stuff mapped out over there? Work on making sure that you have a place where you also can track your goals. I have a couple whiteboards, so we’re on YouTube and in my office, so I’ll show you. I have this big calendar here and then I’m going to flip you this way. That’s my workout stuff. I have that big whiteboard there. I use those to track my goals and I use Trello this way. This is my place. So if you don’t have a place where you’re tracking your goals, I recommend you start one and you get one now so that you are applauding as you go through. You’ve created a space that’s like, this is my goal workspace. And I also want you to celebrate kids, get the sticker charts. You get the sticker charts, right track. Give yourself rewards, treats, check ins, make it fun. One of the reasons I think so many of the moms and the purpose of Mom Club are successful is we gamify everything, right? We make it fun.

Cara Harvey 00:18:15 We make it light. We make it enjoyable. I want you to do the same. Okay, now I know the back to school time can feel like the kids need everything and I have to do it for them. And I get it. But you deserve to grow as well. You deserve to work on your goals. Maybe you put your goals on the backburner this summer. Maybe you didn’t. Okay, but I want to remind you, your kids are watching how you are handling the fresh start. So if you’re stressed, if you’re running around, if you’re like, oh, mom’s so tired. All those things your kids see that? Okay, I want you to start seeing yourself as a student of your own goals. Okay. You’re not just the caretaker. Right? You are learning about your new goal. You’re excited. Take that energy. All right. I know that it’s possible to do it. And there’s just again, there’s something about this time of year that is just so exciting.

Cara Harvey 00:19:01 Okay. So I want you to pick one goal. Pick one of your goals that you’re like, I need to reignite this. And I want you to take one of the five steps today. Okay. Write it down. Choose an action. Schedule it into your week. Start taking that back to school energy with your goals so that you can close out this last third, which is wild like we’re about to hit back to school holiday. I cannot believe how fast this year is gone. You want to achieve your goal? You can do it. You just gotta do it one step at a time. All right. What I’d love for you to do is head over. Leave us a nice five star rating or review if this helps you at all. It’s how more moms find the show. But I also want to encourage you to come check out the Club Pass. You get a chance to hop on any of our calls for the week. So if you go to a Purpose Driven Mom Club Pass, you can check out the call schedule for the week and get support.

Cara Harvey 00:19:43 We can work on your goals. I can coach you through mindset wise or practical. If you’re like, I don’t know how to break this goal down, bring it to me. I’m literally opening up for group coaching for only $10. I would love to see you there. Come and join us! Check out the Purpose Driven Mom Club and show notes. You’ll be at a Purpose Driven mom.com/podcast 471. 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. 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.

Cara Harvey 00:20:32 Thanks for listening. We appreciate you and I can’t wait to connect with you more outside of the podcast.