Cara Harvey (00:04.142)

Welcome to the Purpose Driven Mom Show. Here at 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 fill the laundry, and let’s do this.

Cara Harvey (00:46.254)

It’s your mom show episode 504. We’re closing out March, giving you that sneak peek behind the scenes of my brand new program on purpose. You on purpose. You has three distinct schools, school of clarity, school of alignment and school of momentum. And this week we’re talking about the school of momentum. I originally started crafting and drafting out the school of momentum and it was supposed to be hacks, quick tips, things to get you to actually check things off your to-do list. And we talk about that.

inside the four phases of the School of Momentum. But what it turned into, and what I realized as I went through this with my founding members, was that it’s more than that. Yes. Will we talk about how to dish perfectionism? Sure. Will we talk about what procrastination actually is and why it’s not always your fault? Will we talk about how to get in motion, which is today’s episode from stuck to in motion? And will we talk about how to cross things off your to-do list? 100%. But what happens in these third and fourth phases of the School of Momentum?

is that it shifts because what the School of Momentum is truly about is self-trust. One of the reasons you struggle to show up is because you don’t trust yourself to complete things. And I know you’re like, what? It’s what we talk about the program. Self-trust and building self-trust through tiny wins is what’s going to help grow your confidence. What’s going to help you achieve more things and what’s going to help you be kinder to yourself because you deserve it. The other thing it’s going to do is get you into phase four of School of Momentum, which is self-leadership.

Inside that phase, we talk about self-sabotage, self-leadership, what I call the expansion edge, and how you can move to the next level of your life and step into the person you’ve meant to be when you fully love and trust yourself. And it’s all covered inside this school. It’s so good. Today’s episode is from the School of Momentum. It is from stuck to in motion, and it’s going to help you identify the cycle and the piece of the cycle you’re in that’s keeping you stuck and how do you move forward.

If you’re interested in joining On Purpose You, it’s only $27 a month right now. So head on over to apurposedrivenmom.com slash on purpose you, be a part of this first cohort of people coming in after my founding members and you are going to love it. I know you are. A purposedrivenmom.com slash on purpose you, I am waiting for you in this program.

Cara Harvey (03:00.61)

Come on over and I hope that you enjoy this episode. And I hope you have as many light bulbs as our founding members did. They watched some of these videos and they were like, I didn’t even realize. Like I’ve been watching your stuff for five plus years. I’ve been in your coaching programs. The stuff that you say in this is new, it’s different, and it’s so helpful if you’re feeling stuck. And if right now you are on the hamster reel with your goals and you’ve been doing the same thing over and over and over again, you need to listen in today. Enjoy.

And let me know any ah-has, any takeaways you had. We are in the School of Momentum and our goal in School of Momentum 101 is to move you from stuck to in motion. And we’re gonna set the stage here in the beginning before we dive in and give you all of the nitty gritty and the tips on why you might be feeling stuck and what momentum actually is. It is tiny steps. That is the goal.

of what we are doing, real momentum, lasting change. You’re going to be able to get thrown off and pull it back together. That is the goal with momentum. I say this a lot. Consistency doesn’t mean constantly. And I think when we can actually take a pause and look at how we can create momentum, we can see real change. Cause the truth about being stuck, cause we say it all the time. I’m just stuck. I’m stuck. Right? We think it’s cause we’re lazy.

I’m undisciplined. I’ll never get there, right? I’m bad at following through. What’s actually happening is you’re experiencing what’s called activation resistance. It’s not about your personality, but for so much of our life, we take things so personally. And again, pot, kettle, black, hand up over here, right? I also take things very personally sometimes, but instead of taking it personally, we want to move in motion. A lot of times,

When we’re saying stuck, we’re just not describing it correctly, right? It’s like when you ask your kid how they’re feeling and they’re like happy or sad. That’s not always the emotion. There’s a lot of nuance behind it. So sometimes stuck looks like overthinking. How many of us are guilty of this, right? Instead of getting started on something. Sometimes stuck is planning without doing the executing. I know that we call it procrastinating planning over here. That happens a lot. It’s that waiting feeling. Well, when I’m ready to, when I feel.

Cara Harvey (05:21.822)

equipped to when life is perfect, when schedules look a certain way. Stuck also looks like starting super strong on our goals and then disappearing, right? Disappearing through them. And stuck also is feeling behind before you even begin. Right? And I think that this happens a lot.

Where are you feeling the most stuck right now? Do a little self-assessment. There’s obviously going to be some questions over in your workbook for you, but I really want you to think, if I was to ask you, which of your goals do you feel the most stuck with right now? What would pull out for you? Oftentimes our brain is what’s getting in our way because it’s resisting starting. Now the neuroscience behind it says that our brain prioritizes safety. That is like the brain’s number one concern. Like how do I keep us safe?

Our brain also will prioritize certainty over risk and energy conservation, which is such an interesting thing to think about, but that’s what our brain is doing. It’s thinking, wait, I might not have the energy to do this later. So how can I conserve it now? Any new action that we do is considered uncertain because we don’t know what’s happening. This is why anxiety happens, right? It’s unpredictable. Uncertainty though, is considered a perceived risk to our brain. So our brain is thinking this

feels unsafe, so I’m not gonna start. It’s not that you’re broken, you’re not lazy, you’re not motivated, it’s that you’re wired for safety and your brain needs some tips and strategies and some honestly, reassurance to move forward. Motivation is not the problem. Motivation will file a motion. And I think a lot of times we think it’s the other way around. I’ll just be motivated and I do it.

And the whole entire goal with the school of momentum is this, is how do we get you moving in motion in order to get motivation? It goes that way. We also have this thing, excuse me, called the activation threshold. Every single task that we do, right, has a perceived size, right? Like how big a task is, it’s those things where your brain’s like, this is so overwhelming, it’s so big, right?

Cara Harvey (07:37.856)

It also has this emotional weight carried there. A lot of times we don’t think about the emotional weight of a task, but every task has it. And it has an energy requirement.

Cara Harvey (08:09.806)

Are you looking to spend attention time with your kid and have no idea where it’s gonna 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 gonna 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 it was draw a house and then it said the parent to draw a rainbow and a sun. 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 attention on my kid and I don’t know what to do. Well, I’ve made a plan for you. You can go to a purpose driven mom.com slash 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.com slash draw with mom.

When your threshold in any of these three areas feels too high, we freeze. That fight, flight, freeze, or fawn, we freeze. The goal is to lower your threshold in these three areas to get yourself out of stuck and into in motion. Now I want to talk to you briefly about something we’re going to talk about throughout the School of Momentum, and it’s called the freeze cycle. Because I think when we can identify and notice what’s happening, we can make appropriate changes.

The freeze cycle, we’ll go through each stage in a second, starts with the trigger, moves into overwhelm or doubt. Then we delay, shame, our confidence is lowered. So we delay more. Now let’s go over what the freeze cycle is and then we’ll talk about how do we get out of it. First up is the trigger. Freeze doesn’t start with quote unquote laziness. It starts with any of these actions, right? You make a decision. I have to go do this. You make a new goal. I want to work on this. You stretch yourself. You’re uncomfortable. Something is vulnerable.

Cara Harvey (10:12.568)

There’s a task with emotional weight. This is the trigger. Something happens that causes us to freeze. The threshold, the activation threshold is too high. We then get that emotional spike right before the delay part. We feel the self-doubt, the judgment, the fear of failing or even success. Like what if this does go well? That uncertainty that our brain hates, the overwhelm, right? Right before the delay, one of these things happens.

spikes inside of our brain, one of these things, and then our nervous system interprets this as a risk, and then the delay happens. All right? So we start here with our trigger. Something happens to cause overwhelm or doubt. So therefore we delay. We stay quote unquote stuck. So our protection response from our brain is like, I’m just not going to do this right now. So it offers something different. Should I just pick up my phone? Maybe if I scroll.

You know what, maybe if I just research this a tiny bit more, I’ll feel better. I’m going to not go declutter this thing. I’m going to go tighter something that feels safe. Do you find yourself picking up the same things over and over? Right. let me plan this out a little bit more, or I’ll wait till tomorrow because it feels logical. It feels protective to our brain. Delay is actually giving us immediate relief from this emotional spike, which feels safe.

and becomes the reward. So our brain becomes trained in like, well, if I scroll my phone, if I over plan, if I go back to the drawing board and learn more, then I feel safe again, because it’s predictable and there’s no uncertainty. So then we go back and your brain begins to learn this avoidance works. If I avoid this task for whatever reason, I will get out of the emotional spike.

And therefore I’m getting rewarded. And your brain has now learned that if you just avoid the task, you don’t have to deal with the emotion of the fear, of the overwhelm, the uncertainty. So then we get this layer of shame. Cause while our brain now feels like it’s in this cute little safe protected pocket, we then sit and deal with the shame. Cause we did just delay our goal. That was important. Our task was important. So then we ask ourselves things like,

Cara Harvey (12:40.962)

Why am I like this? Right? Other people can just do things. Like if I just had more discipline, everything would be fine. Right? Like I always do this to myself. And then shame lowers our energy because we’re exhausted from putting ourselves through it. The less energy hat we have means our activation threshold, right? Has increased. And now we’re freezing more. So now your brain is stuck back in this loop.

We still haven’t done it. We still haven’t done it. Why didn’t you get started? And this creates that background anxiety. Now we’re, where do I start? We’re stuck in decision fatigue. And then we have a reduced cognitive capacity. Cause you’re like, I just can’t handle anything else anymore. Repeatedly freezing is causing you an identity distortion. It is breaking your confidence because the shame piece is saying I’m a failure. It’s making the quote stuck your personality.

So we have to get out of it, right? We have to get out of the freeze cycle in order to move from stuck to in motion. The goal is to rewire and that’s exactly what we’re going to be doing in the entire school of momentum. It’s how do we rewire your brain to get out of the cycle faster? Yes, there’s going to be times where you freeze, procrastinate, cetera, but how do we move faster? How do we get momentum quicker so that we can move in action? And the first time we’ll feel uncomfortable, we will absolutely not want to do it.

But the goal here is to interrupt your loop. Discomfort itself could be a new action. It gives you relief and it gives you confidence. So what I want you to do is think through a task that you feel stuck with. All right, that task I asked you before. What is it? What are the emotions that came up? Now I have all these questions inside your workbook. So I want you to spend some time kind of journaling and thinking through, right? Like what was that emotional response?

Did you delay? Did you scroll? What did you do? And what was the reward? Because there was a reward. There are positive and negative consequences that we get for everything. And sometimes the reward may not seem like an outward reward because we’re not getting something good, but our brain being kept safe is still a reward, right? So what did the avoidance give you? And what did it cost you? I want you to journal through this because here’s the thing we’re going to talk about in this part of the school. You.

Cara Harvey (15:05.142)

cannot think your way into motion, right? You have to move your way into clarity. You have to physically do something to disrupt your cycle to move forward. And my plan and goal in this entire school is to give you tips, tricks, hacks, things that you can do to move into motion. Clarity, knowing what you have to do, is not going to create your action. Action will create your clarity.

So you finished the school of clarity perhaps, or maybe you’re starting here in momentum. And if you’ve gone through clarity, you probably have a good idea of what you’d like to do. But I hear this a lot from the women I coach of like, I know what I have to do, but I’m having trouble getting started because we need the action. And when you take action, you will get more clarity, which is why I tell you to not park in the school of clarity. You get there, you journal, you think, you process, and then you keep moving. I just want to remind you this though, because there’s so much shame rooted here.

Momentum itself, it’s not a personality trait. It’s simply a pattern. Tiny action, repeat. Tiny action, repeat. This is moving you from, I start things, to I will move things forward. 1%. I don’t need to finish, I just need to move. Forward motion counts. And I want you to think of that through every tip, every video, every lesson. If you dive into any of the other electives and classes.

Forward motion counts if you can see it happening, right? I put one thing away, I put one dish away, forward motion. It reduces your resistance to something. I slept in my workout clothes and that was a big step for me. And it builds evidence. Oh look, I am someone who can show up to get my workout done. I want you to journal this out. I really want you to think through your stuck point right now and practice going through the freeze cycle. Cause my first School of Momentum 101 tip for you is,

when you find yourself in the freeze cycle is interrupting the pattern and journaling through these questions because it’ll stop your brain.

Cara Harvey (17:11.586)

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 podcasts, 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 aha, make sure you come over and tag me, add 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.

Thanks for listening. We appreciate you. And I can’t wait to connect with you more outside of the podcast.