Cara (00:16.534)

Welcome to the Purpose Your Mom Show, episode 519. We’re here in the thick of summer, and we are going to be heading into July with a little bit of a summer reset series. This is a really good time of year to take a pause and reset mid year. We’re gonna talk about how do you reset your home, your calendar, and your brain. Show notes are gonna be over at a purposedrivermom.com, such podcast 519. If you have

looked around at any point right now in the summer and thought, how did this get off track, right? You’ve got beach tails everywhere and everything’s a mess and none of the goals has happened. And you look at your planner and you’re like, well, this thing looked great in January. But now I have 8 million tabs. Everything feels chaotic and I just don’t know where to go from here. I got you, friend. That’s what we’re gonna talk about today. This episode is your permission slip to reset without

completely starting over. And we’re gonna do it at a three-pronged approach. How do you reset your home, your calendar, and your brain to kind of allow yourself to again decompress and enjoy your summer and move on track with your goals. I know that the laundry’s piled up. I know that you forgot about all the beautiful things on your summer bucket list at this point. You’ve said yes to things you shouldn’t have and you know you feel like you’re never gonna catch up. But what you don’t need right now is throw it all out.

Sometimes, depending on where I’m at in my cycle too, I’m in this like burn it all down phase, like right before I’d say like the week before I get my period. I hate everything. I’m like, get rid of it all, burn it all down. It’s not working. So I always say before you decide to do any of that, check where you’re at in your cycle, but also remind yourself like, I know you want it, but you don’t need a new planner. I actually have an episode coming about planners and how it’s not gonna save you, but you don’t need a new one. You don’t need to overhaul every single routine and make it perfect.

You don’t need to make over your whole life. Not everything is failing. And we get to this all or nothing thinking where we’re like, nothing is working. It’s not true. Right? Maybe there are some things out of alignment for you and we’re gonna move back in. What you probably need the most is a little bit of a pause, a little bit of a reset, maybe a 15-minute pickup, and to return to what matters and kind of go into the rest of the summer and the rest of the year that way. All right. Mid-year can feel really heavy because of just the natural drift of it all.

Cara (02:32.332)

Your routines are loose right now because it’s summer. The commitment’s piled up all year and a bunch of stuff has gotten forgotten. and you said you were gonna do it, but then you didn’t work on that goal. You’ve got so much mental clutter because the to-do list just keeps running through your head. So you’re feeling your decision fatigue. Summer, especially. I feel like for me in the summer, I feel like I have all these great intentions, and then I get going and I’m like, what are we doing, right?

Because I have less structure, because I have more interruptions, right? My expectations have shifted a smidge for my kids and for myself. I find myself permitting myself to relax more, which isn’t a it’s not a bad thing, right? I don’t want you to be clear. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but because I’ve been going so fast and so much during the school year, now that I’m in summer, I can feel the pendulum swing sometimes to that other side. And so now I’m just like, where am I going? What am I doing?

And I’m tired. The emotional exhaustion from caregiving more consistently in the summer. and again, this is my personal experience. D depends on you, right? if you’re still have the same work schedule, maybe things don’t look as different for you. If you’ve homeschooled all year round, maybe things will look different for you. My kids go to traditional school and I work from home for one of my jobs. I have three essentially part time jobs that I do. I

run this company here at Purpose Dover Mom. I work for a nonprofit called Girls Empowered, where I teach leadership and self-development skills to elementary through high schoolers. And I run a website called Macaroni Kid in the northeast Philadelphia area where I live where I help connect parents with events. I’m doing the thing, right? I’m all over the place. But now my kids are home. So now it’s like, well they’re at school all the time. So my you know, I’m still doing a lot activity-wise, but now they’re home. And so I’m tired. It’s constant. And

You know, it was really funny. So I’m batching these episodes, full transparency, ahead. It’s May right now. And this episode’s coming out in July. But again, it’s part of my strategy, friends, because I’m not trying to record all summer. I’m trying to enjoy. So we batch, so we don’t have to worry about it. But yesterday my kids head off of school. So we had a sneak peek into summer, especially because we had a heat wave. So it’s like 90-something degrees. I watched one of my

Cara (04:42.956)

daughter’s friends in the morning, then we went over to another friend’s house in the afternoon to go swimming. And then my daughter had like a random tumbling lesson at night. So and then we had the the rest of the evening off. So it felt very much what I think summer’s gonna feel like. I also had to work and I gotta get things done. And it was a challenge because I wasn’t as intentional as I wanted to be, but it was also that challenge of not refereeing my kids, but just

resetting the norms. Now again, this is May and it’s beginning of summer. At this point in July, I’m hoping we got some norms set of like where do your beach towels go? stop leaving the door open. The dog is gonna get out. Trying to like pick up after things, doing resets. It’s time for snack. please turn the hose off. Like we were just doing like all these things. So I’m hoping by July, and I will listen to Kara in the future when I listen to this episode, we’ve got some more of our routines set up, right? Like

But I was tired yesterday. I’m not gonna even lie. Like, all right, we have to pick this up. You took the sidewalk shock out. Where does it go? You can’t take something else out. Stop eating snacks. Like it felt like a summer day already. And was like, my, is this where we’re going? Right. So the problem at this point of the year, it’s not usually laziness, right? It’s that the systems aren’t matching the season. And it’s a great time to reset for summer and fall and beyond so that you can close out the year feeling good in your goals and in your home and in your life.

Cara (06:15.918)

All right, so let’s start with your home. I’m gonna talk to you about how you can reset your home right now and maybe give yourself a little bit of breath. The goal for resetting your home mid-year is not the perfection. And it’s not deep cleaning everything. Though I will say I do have a personal deep cleaning goal in July. I’m sorry, June, July, and August because I’m home more. So this is one of those where it’s like if you have the space and the time, maybe it’s a good time for you to do more cleaning, like I’m choosing to do.

But if you’re just doing a reset, that’s not your goal. My goal is a little different because I’m not doing a reset. I have a deep cleaning goal. Okay, so I want you to hear the distinction. but if your goal is like, I just need to reset the home because things feel out of control, you’re not organizing every closet, right? You’re not taking everything out. The goal here with a home reset is breathing room for yourself, reducing, this is the big one, the visual clutter, getting rid of the visual overwhelm.

That is going to plague you because you keep saying it and it’s running your mental load and just making your day-to-day life simpler and easier. I’m gonna give you some suggestions. You take them or leave them based on your home and what works for you. All right. But this is how I would include doing a home reset. And I would maybe do it over the course of a week so that you can kind of walk through each room and do it in small chunks instead of all at once. But if it works better for you,

To take like two hours on one day of the week and do the whole house, go for it. If you would rather lean your schedule towards doing one room a day, you can do that as well, right? So these are the areas I would suggest doing. And then what I’m gonna do is kind of walk through the flow I would follow, right? I would definitely do a kitchen reset 100%. The kitchen is our hub. so that’s always like one of my first places to go when I’m feeling overwhelmed. It’s like, let me reset that kitchen, okay? Laundry.

Especially in the summer. You know, my husband laughed. He was like, We do a lot of laundry. And I think we’re noticing it more now because my son played baseball this season and he played travel baseball. So he’s on two teams and surprise, surprise, they have white uniforms. Because that’s a brilliant idea. So you know, baseball moms probably feel my pain here. and they have s baseball was like every day, like every single day. he has his practice stuff, which is fine. But sometimes he would have like a game on Friday and a game on Saturday.

Cara (08:38.648)

For his other team, and then a game on Sunday for his like, so it’s like everything anyway. I felt like I did so much laundry the past couple months. But easily the summer can feel like laundry piles up. again, I’m just gonna use yesterday as a great example. that there were beach towels like everywhere because the kids were running in and out, they went swimming at a friend’s, like, there were bathing suits, and everything was just kind of everywhere. So this morning I was like, We just need to, I’m just gonna walk through my house with the laundry basket and we’re gonna just like wash all the random stuff.

Everything that’s didn’t make it in the house, stuff like that. paper clutter is another one. I actually did my paper clutter today. not intentionally, I’m gonna be honest, I lost something and I could not find, and I still do not know where this important paper is, and I’m just praying it shows up today for me. I know it will, like I know it’s in front of my face, but doing your paper clutter is also gonna be an important home reset because it piles up. So I actually was looking for something and I had to spend 20 minutes trying to find it. Again, if I had done my paper clutter.

I wouldn’t have been in this situation, but I didn’t have a good enough system. So here’s where we’re at, right? Going through that paper clutter, going through the old bills, the papers, I found a bunch of stuff like the kids’ school pictures. Like I never hung them up. They are still sitting there from October when we got them. so yeah, I’m gonna put them in their bins and things like that. if you have a drop zone, an entryway, a mud room, whatever you have in your home, I also recommend you do a little bit of a reset there because that’s the space where most of your visual clutter is gonna be.

Shoe, we have shoe bin. That’s always a big one. Where I’m like, all right, our shoe bin, like we typically do this on Sundays. Get your shoes. I let my kids keep one pair of shoes in our shoe bin that exists because otherwise it’s just like massively overflowed. We’ve got cleats and 800 different types of shoes and sneakers and crucks and sandals and like so. I let them on Sundays, you may keep one pair of shoes in there, and it’s like the pair they’re wearing that day. Everything else has got to go back to your room, right? Doing that entryway closet hoodies and coats, etc.

I also recommend your fridge or your pantry, doing a nice reset there just to see like what groceries we have, what do we have going on, especially when we’re snacking all the time. Let’s eat the snacks we have. Like I told my kids in the summer, like, we’re not snacking all day. That’s my line. Steal if you want. We’re not snacking all day. We will have snack time. So you get get yourself out the pantry. At X time, we’re gonna sit and have a snack, and we’re gonna have like an actual snack, like a balanced snack. So you’re not just eating all of the snacks like day one, right?

Cara (11:03.428)

which is something I notice happens to us a lot if I don’t set the norms around snacks. My kids are just snack goblins. and if you have a command center where you keep your calendar, right? What I recommend you do though is you go through your home and you think about what your main living spaces are first. So this will probably be your kitchen, your drop zone, or your entryway. right? Those are probably the biggest ones. I again, the place where your visual clutter is, and you’re gonna focus on there. The goal here is functionality over aesthetics.

We’re not organizing. We’re not gonna buy a new you know, little organizer or tray or anything like that. You’re making quick wins. That is it. What you’re going to do is involve the family for the home reset because they live here too. this I said they live here too. They live there too, but it’s ca I say it like that because that’s the phrase I use all the time. You live here too, right? Mom doesn’t have to clean all everything up. If your stuff is in a lived common space.

It needs to go back to your room. And I give my kids, and this is the thing too. So my kids are crafters, okay? My kids are builders. My son is gifted and his brain is just like the stuff he makes and like creates. I don’t know if anyone else has creators in their home. The amount of construction paper and like so we ha tend to have a lot of stuff everywhere, often Legos, etc.

I don’t make them clean it all up all the time every day because sometimes they’re continuing to play with stuff. But I give them a deadline. All right, you have until Wednesday. And on Wednesday, this is needs to get picked up. My son is forts. He’s a big fort maker. But in order to make his forts, he will often steal my chairs from my kitchen. He’ll take every blanket and like make these massive apartment forts in his room. I love this for him. But at the same time, I need to sit down and also I need a reset. So I I recommend like

One, get the kids involved, but if they’re keeping some of their projects out because they’re working on them over time, my daughter, for example, so her and her friend friends, they started a squishy selling business. I don’t know, the nino needos, everybody’s you know, it’s the craze. They’re making them and they’re selling them. It’s super cute. They want to go to the beach this summer, they’re saving money. I support it. Love the entrepreneurship. They did market research, they crafted their product plan to make sure they have profit, like it’s super cute, the whole thing. But it’s messy and it lives everywhere.

Cara (13:24.898)

So I have to sometimes give my kids a timeline of saying this is when it’s going. It has to go back into your space or into your room, but involve them in it and then put on a timer. Okay. We’re gonna see how much we can get put away in 15 minutes. I’m gonna put on some music and we’re gonna go. The other thing I recommend though, excuse me, is if you involve your kids, you have to be very concrete. This is what I find for my kids. So again, yours are you know, wired however they are, but I’d be concrete. If we’re resetting, I need to be very specific about what they do in what order. It’s not.

We have 15 minutes. Let’s see what we can get put away. Not gonna work for my kids. So I’m very clear. Your fur I will like look at my kid in the eye. Your first step is to go to the shoe bin and take everything but one pair of shoes and put it on your shoe rack in your room. When you’re done, come find me. I will give you your second task. I’m gonna put on a timer. He has five minutes to go do that or whatever. He comes back. The next thing I need you to do is any crafts that you have left in the room, you need to either decide if you’re gonna throw them away.

Or put them in your room. And he has like a section where he can hang stuff up and things like that. Okay, go. I need you to now go and pick up all the socks that you leave everywhere. I don’t know what it is this kid. Just leave socks everywhere. Right? Like very concrete. If you tell kids, go clean up, you gotta be really specific. Make a system for them. Bonus points for yourself. If you make this system into a visual chart for them, so then when it is time to do a reset, you don’t have to be the one telling them what to do. You say go to your chart, check off your first task.

Second task, third task, remove yourself, right? I want you to think about how you can clear that emotional weight of clutter for yourself to just reset the home a little bit. Okay. It would make your whole week so much easier, right? So that’s what we’re asking. We’re not trying to fix the whole house. We’re saying, how can we make this week easier? All right. So that’s resetting your home mid-year, midsummer, whenever you need it, take this and run with

Cara (15:31.234)

We’ve done our home. Let’s reset our calendar. Calendar overload. We know it’s real in the summer. We overcommit as we’re trying to make up for all the stuff we didn’t get done over the school year. We want to have all this fun. We’re constantly checking calendars. This is my issue that I’m working on. I I need to look because I feel like I check my calendar so often.

And I’m my kids make fun of me. Like it’s a joke, and I can laugh at myself because I ch I talk things out very auditory, right? Like I just need to process things out loud. And they’re like, We already went over the schedule, mom. Like, why are you telling us again? I’ll be like, we have to go here and here and here. And they’re like, We know, like, but I like for my own anxiety, my own processing, like I need it. But it’s sometimes it’s too much, right? So now you might also like full on the checking it. What are we doing? Where are we going? And so it leads you feeling like more reactive than instead of intentional.

I when I am in a healthy place with my calendar, it’s like I’ve done my Sunday plan. I know what my appointments are. I don’t have to check it a hundred times. I know what’s gonna happen. So, what I want you to do is I want you to do a calendar audit for the rest of the summer and see how you can take it into the fall. What sort of things are you doing this summer that just aren’t serving you? Are you trying to do too many things? This tends to be like a really big one for us in the summers where we’re trying to do way too much stuff, right? Have you given yourself just like a day home? Now

This is the thing I also say with caveat. You your home, your family. My kids, very active, my son. So if I’m trying to also set tech limits, like, okay, if I said if my I let my kids watch TV all day, they’d be chill, right? Like they would just be chilling all day long, but I don’t want that for them. So the yes, they watch TV, but I try to like put some boundaries on it. my kid is very active. So I I do find that I need to like get him out of the house to do things.

But I think it’s also good for all of us to just like be bored and chill. So if you’re over planning, is that a place you can you can audit? do you notice things in your calendar getting skipped? Now I talk about this a lot in my program when we’re doing some coaching. A lot of times it’s like, why do I keep skipping this one task? I said I’m gonna do my cleaning at this time of day. Why am I skipping it? Right? Like, what is the thing that’s holding me back? is there anything you’re dreading doing? You’re like, I do not want to do this. I have no interest in any of this. I

Cara (17:50.604)

Do not want to get this done. And so I drag my feet every single time. And what matters for me? I want you to ask yourself this one. What matters for me, not just in the rest of whatever time you have in the summer? Because again, it’s July. Your kids can be going back early August, late August, September. Depends on where you live. My kids go back end of August. What matters for the rest of summer? And then I want you to look a little bit beyond. What do you want to carry into the fall? What e matters for you in the fall?

I want you to review like the recurring commitments that you have, the ones that are gonna get put back on your plate when the school year starts, and ask, do I wanna keep these? Or am I ready to say goodbye to them? Are there again, I I’ve complained about baseball. I think like every episode, my kid does like it. Do I wanna encourage us to play on a travel team again? I don’t know. I don’t know the answer, right? Maybe we just play rec and it is what it is. Review those things for yourself and decide.

Make sure you’ve got buffer time added into your plan. I think you’re gonna feel really happy that you do that. And I want you to simplify the activities you put on your calendar for the rest of the summer. But again, look to the fall. A big mistake a lot of us are gonna make when we come to the fall. And again, hand up, because I do it too, is putting way too much stuff on your plate once the school year starts again. Take a pause on that. Okay. I also want you to pre-plan out some rest days for yourself at least one every week.

For the rest of your summer, whatever summer looks like for you, where you have nothing, like plan a nothing day. There’s no activities, we’re not going anywhere, we’re chilling at home. I’m gonna read my book, I’m gonna sit outside, like I’m gonna slow down because it’s going to help you. if you’ve heard me talk to I’m blue in the face about my time blocking method, this is a good time to think about how you can use perhaps theme time blocking. And I want you to plan your calendar and make sure it’s planned a little bit around your energy, especially summer energy where it’s hot and we’re a little bit dragging.

So that you can have some nice rhythms that flow and you don’t feel like you’re pushing against things. Remember that a full calendar, it doesn’t mean that you have this meaningful life. It just means you got more stuff on your calendar and it’s probably stressing you out. So the goal of resetting your calendar mid-year is not only to audit for the summer, but audit for the school year that’s about to come. Think about it now while you’re not in that zone.

Cara (20:20.6)

Finally, let’s talk about how you can reset your brain. You, the thing that matters so much. Take a breath, friends. This is the most important reset, right? Because when we’re not taking care of ourselves, we know that we’re no good. To others, to ourselves, we start to hit burnout. We live in this like place of mental clutter. This is a lot of what we’re gonna talk about right now in this section is like how do we reset the mental clutter? If you feel like you’re forgetting stuff still, you’re irritable.

You just got too many things going on, you’re doom scrolling, you know, you’re not focused because you’re exhausted, then you’re probably carrying too much mental load. And we’ve talked about this, right? The planning, the anticipating, the remembering, the invisible tasks. So I want to give you some practical strategies to reset out your mental load and your brain so that you feel like you can kind of take on the rest of summer with a little bit more ease. Step one is brain dump it all.

All the stuff you’ve been thinking. And I want you to categorize a little bit. Here’s the stuff I’m thinking about for July. Here’s the back to school stuff I’m thinking. Cause I know you’re already starting this. The notes are home. Here’s the supply list. I know you’re starting to think about it, right? So start to brain dump it out now and then categorize it. I want you to go through and really categorize it by urgency so you know one, what you have to focus on, but two, in what order. And stop trying to hold it all mentally. Make some systems. I mentioned that checklist of resetting.

Your kids don’t have to check in with you. They can check in with a piece of paper, right? Having these things for yourself, these systems, meal planning systems, nightly pickup systems, laundry systems, they make your life so much easier because you’re not having to make constant decisions. The one thing that I think you’re not gonna like, but I’m gonna tell you I would recommend you do right now, is reducing your input. In was it April or May? In our purpose your mom club for our book club, we read the book, How to Break Up with Your Phone.

And in May, I started going through the 30 days. Now I’m again recording this in May. I haven’t finished the 30 days. So hopefully by this point, I’ve made it through the 30 days and I feel you know, relieved that I made it there. But I’m gonna tell you, reduce to the input, friend. We our brains are not meant to take in this much stuff. Pause the scrolling, be present. This is the one thing I will say I do like about summer is because we spend a lot of time outside, we have a pool, like I mentioned. I’m sitting out there, I don’t want my phone to get super hot.

Cara (22:45.004)

So I keep my phone on the charger. I wear my Apple Watch outside. So like if the phone rings, like I’m here. But if you have Apple Watch, you know, it’s not fun. Like it’s not fun to scroll. There’s nothing fun to do on my Apple Watch. It’s just there, like if somebody texts me or calls me and needs me, you know, I have it. So I keep my phone inside a lot in the summer, and it feels so good to just not have it on me. And I am picking it up less. One of the tasks in the how to break up with your phone was to just like pay attention to how many times you pick up your phone, why you’re picking up your phone.

And my analysis, I’m only on the week one of the 30-day challenge. It’s like for me, it’s just like boredom. And it’s not even real boredom. I have trained my brain, like many of us, to be constantly stimulated. So if there is literally a 30-second pause, I don’t know how to be alone with myself. Like there’s a commercial on TV. I’m I’m sitting at a red light. I have to go to the bathroom. I’m waiting a minute for someone to get on a Zoom. I don’t know how to just sit, even for 30 seconds. And that was one of the signs that I was like, I need to get off my phone.

Because the input was just making my patients low and it was I I did I had no attention span. So I want you to reduce the input you’re taking in, reduce the scrolling you’re doing so that you’re also not comparing your summer to somebody else’s and giving yourself that brain break.

Cara (24:09.09)

I want you to make sure you’re giving yourself quiet time, reflection time. one of the things we do in the summer is like we sit with the fire pit. And I will like put my audiobook in and just like sit outside and like stare at the fire and like hang with my husband. Like we’re both outside listening separately to our audiobooks, like together, because it’s like too dark to read, but I can listen. And it’s just nice to just have one piece of stimulation, right? I want you to choose one priority, one thing you want to focus on for the rest of the summer so that you can

Relax a little bit and let your brain pause. I want you to have a simple reset. This doesn’t have to be a whole project. It doesn’t need to be, you know, this whole thing that takes hours. You’re gonna do start a reset for your home, either one to two hours one day or break it into different rooms throughout the week. Go ahead and look at your calendar, do a little bit of an audit, and then brain dump all these things to feel more calm. I want you to think what’s feeling heavy or

What do I want to simplify? What am I still carrying? And what can I let go of? It’s great to do a mid year reset. It’s awesome to do it in the summer when priorities have shifted. And I find that when my when I’m slowed down a little bit more, I’m able to think clearly about what I didn’t like about the way the school year went, which tends to be too much on my plate, and make better choices. It is a reset for yourself to allow you to recalibrate, not overhaul everything and see what works.

I’ve put show notes for you at a purposedrivermom.com slash podcast five nineteen. So you can check those out. Have a wonderful rest of your day and enjoy your reset.