Hello Mama, and welcome to blog post EIGHT of Mumstoppable!

First, I get you’re busy, Mama. So let me tell you the top 3 reasons I think you should spend the next 30 mins listening to Mumstoppable Episode EIGHT (or reading the show notes if you prefer):

Rediscover Yourself in 30 Minutes:

• Join me on a journey of self-discovery designed for busy mums. In just 30 minutes, I'll guide you through the process of shaking off that feeling of being "lost" and help you identify what truly matters to you. Reconnect with yourself beyond the chaos of motherhood.

Unlock the Power of Your Core Values:

• Learn the importance of values in shaping your identity and decisions. As a mum who understands the constant evolution of motherhood, I'll share insights on how identifying and understanding your core values can anchor you amidst the challenges. Discover what's truly important to you, Mama!

Embrace Guilt-Free Fun with the #CoachingChallenge:

• I get it, guilt often accompanies the idea of spending time just for yourself. This week's #CoachingChallenge is all about having a playdate with yourself – an activity solely for your enjoyment. Rediscover the joy of doing things you love without any other reason than having fun. Remember, "time you enjoy wasting is not wasted." 

Ready to invest 30 minutes in yourself, Mama?

For those of you that want to listen - click below to play the podcast:

Otherwise, you can read this week’s show notes below:

Hello Mama! Welcome to blog post EIGHT of Mumstoppable! I’m so glad you’re here, thank you for committing to investing 30 mins this week just for you! I’ve said this before but it’s so important for you to spend some time dedicated to yourself, Mama. I see you sacrificing for your family, I see you putting their needs before yours, and I’m here to support you through putting YOUR needs first for just 30 mins a week. This will help you grow as a woman, but also as a mother too.

Right, so, bearing in mind I know how busy you are, and that you have a million and one things on your to do list, let’s dive right into today’s post. This week I’ve had a couple of new clients start their coaching journeys with me, and it’s given me an opportunity to reflect on the most common problems we face as mums. The interesting thing is, most - if not all - of my clients come to me struggling with the idea of who they are and what they want from life. It’s like motherhood has completely swallowed the individual, and in the process we almost forget what life was like before and can’t seem to figure out who we are - outside of that “mum” label. So I want to focus today on that journey of rediscovery. Of really looking at you, beyond the mum mask.

Today, in the next 30 minutes in fact, I’m going to guide you on a journey to rediscover what is important to you. I’m going to help you to shake that feeling of being “lost” and of not knowing who you are. I’m going to help and support you in learning how to identify what you want, because that’s the very first step in the journey of working out how to get there!

Now the first thing to say, Mama, is that if you are struggling with “who you are” right now… that is totally normal!! For a lot of mums, it hits hardest when you first become a mum. But I also want to be clear in that it’s normal to experience this multiple times throughout your life. 

Because let’s not forget, motherhood is a journey. It’s fraught with challenges, and often when we solve one challenge, a new phase starts and brings with it new challenges. For example, when the kids start school you lose the challenge of how you keep them entertained all day everyday, but you gain the challenge of worrying about whether they are making friends okay, and whether they are learning, etc etc. When they are that bit older, you lose the challenge of dealing with tantrums, and gain the challenge of dealing with technology and when they should be given a phone. When they leave school and go to Uni or start work, the new challenge is that you’ve lost your baby and are now dealing with a semi-adult who you still desperately want to protect… 

And in each of these phases, Mama, we are having to re-discover ourselves. We’re having to create new identities to be able to face these challenges.

Now, just to reassure you further, I am trained in coaching… I spent the best part of 2 years studying to become a coach, and I continue my studies to this day. I have also been a mum for almost a decade. So I am well aware of the challenges, having experienced them repeatedly. And yet I STILL go through these identity crises, even now. My last one was late last year when I felt, almost overnight, that I had no idea who I was, what my purpose was, and what I wanted to do with my life…

It is relentless, but there are tools we can use to anchor ourselves. To ground ourselves in who we are outside of the madness of motherhood. To teach us what is really important to us, and thus reconnect us with who we really are underneath it all… Do you get me?

So let’s jump into #coachingcorner now, Mama. Because I want to talk to you about values. 

Values are SO important to us as individuals:

• They provide our upfront motivation in life

• They impact the decisions we take

• And also the meanings we make of things - because we are always viewing life through the lens of our values

• You’ll spend your time and your money on your values too, because again they dictate what is important to you

It stands to reason, then, that when we feel lost, and like we don’t have a North Star, it might be because we aren’t sure of our values. It’s also important to note that values CHANGE over time. And because motherhood is such a massive shift in terms of priorities, it also often impacts a change in our values. So we can feel a little bit out of sorts, and as though we aren’t sure who we are anymore. Again - THIS IS TOTALLY NORMAL, Mama. So if this is you right now, don’t panic. And even if it isn’t you, rediscovering and labelling your values is a really brilliant activity to do semi-regularly, to illustrate what is REALLY important to you.

Now, that brings me onto identifying our values, which is easier said than done… As a side note, bearing in mind I am trained in this and regularly help my clients identify their values, I struggle to do my own without the help of my coach. And actually she helped me re-do my values a few weeks ago. So there is NO SHAME in this taking you a while. It’s not easy to be objective on your own…

And with that, let’s crack on. So what is a value? It’s a short phrase or word which we will have a few of, and which will naturally have an order of importance in our hearts and minds. (Although again this is not always obvious until you think it through). Values are intangible, they’re not physical things so you can’t pick them up! (I’ll go into this more as we talk through the exercise). Examples of values might include love, connection, wealth, strength, honesty, kindness, fairness, hope, power, education. There are SO many possibilities, and everyone’s values are different.

Okay lastly, you will have DIFFERENT VALUES for different areas of your life… For example your values in business will likely be very different to your values in your relationship. This again is completely normal, and it means you can re-do this values exercise for different parts of your life. 

Today though, I want you to think about your LIFE VALUES, since we are wanting to rediscover who you are at your core.

Now, using that trusty pen and paper, or the notes app on your phone, or just thinking things through, I want you to ask yourself:

“What is important to you in your life?”........

Take your time, and just start writing things down. List them out. BUT as you are doing this, I want you to check each time… is this value I am about to write down a physical thing? Could I pick it up in my hands? Could I touch it? If so, go a step deeper and ask “what is it about this thing that is important to me?” As an example, money may be important to you. But what is it about money specifically that is important to you? Is it the wealth? Is it the fact it allows you to have freedom? Is it the stability it provides? Is it because it pays for you to travel? Do you see how “money” is not a value, but wealth, freedom, stability, travel are? Because you can’t touch those things.

Good, now keep going until you get stuck. At this point I want you to keep going and eek out one or two more values please, Mama!

Good work! Now in all likelihood you’ll have a fairly long list at this point and that’s okay, because now we’re going to list them in order of importance. To do this I want you to look at your list and answer the question “which of these values is MOST important in my life right now? Which of these things am I spending my TIME and MONEY on?” (The reason I added that last bit is these are often a key indicator of what is most important to you at any given time).

When you’ve worked through a few of these, if you find yourself getting stuck again, start to go up from the bottom… “Which of these is LEAST important to me in my life right now? Which of these things am I spending the LEAST amount of time and money on?” and work your way up.

Hopefully you’ll meet in the middle and will have a comprehensive list of values, in order of importance. Well done Mama, that’s really excellent work!

Now the human brain can only cope with so much information, so to shrink these down I want you to pull off your top 5-8 values from that list. The others are still important to you. They are still values, but let’s call these our CORE values.

Read them out now, Mama. How do they feel? Do you see YOU in there? (Hint - the answer should be yes, and if it isn’t you may need some help to properly identify your values!)

Hopefully this shows you very clearly WHAT is important to you. And thus gives you an insight into who you are, behind the Mama mask. How does that make you feel? Do you feel seen again? Do you feel clarity?

Now, remember I told you earlier that values can change over time? They’re also a great way of measuring progress, because you can do them at the start and end of a process, or at specific times in your life, to see how you’ve changed.  This is key because for example in coaching I often find that a client’s values are one way at the start of our journey together (and often values relating to self-love are VERY low down on the list, if they appear at all) and by the end her values have shifted and she can very clearly see the shift in her life (what she spends her time and money on) reflected in the new list of values.

Give it a go, Mama! List out your values and keep the list somewhere safe. And do them again in a few months or when you’ve spent some time working on yourself and see whether you notice a difference.

#coachingchallenge

Excellent, Mama! Now we can move on to this week’s #coachingchallenge! So the thinking here is that again at the start of my coaching journeys with my clients, a lot of the time there is a real sense of guilt around spending time doing something JUST for you. That is born from all the sacrificing we do as mums, especially in the early days, and also a lack of clarity around who we are outside of being “mum”. 

I’m going to quote John Lennon now, when I say “time you enjoy wasting, is not wasted”

This is SO important, Mama, because it means it’s OKAY to spend time watching that TV show and leaving the tidying until later. It’s OKAY to take a nap instead of doing the washing up. It’s OKAY to make time to read a book and then have to order take-out instead of cooking. We all need to spend time doing things we love, and for no reason other than we enjoy it and want to have fun.

Now I’ve set this #coachingchallenge before, but I’m going to mix it up slightly. This week, I want you to have a playdate with yourself, Mama. This is something you’re going to do ALONE. And it’s going to be an activity you are doing JUST FOR YOU and JUST FOR FUN.

Think about things you used to do as a child FOR FUN. Can you resurrect any of them for this challenge? Is there something you’ve wanted to do for ages, but haven’t found the time? THIS IS THE TIME! Take an hour out at some point this week and do something FUN, Mama. That is your challenge.

As a bonus, I have a bit of a cheat sheet of ideas you can look at to get you started with this. If you want that cheat sheet, click on the sidebar to the left and sign up to my newsletter. You can then download my Self-Love Journal for FREE, and in there you will find the #playdate cheat sheet as a bonus. Have a read, pick something from the list or think of something of your own, and let me know how you get on by emailing my at [email protected]

I can’t wait to hear how you get on!

Now before I go, Mama, because you’ve stuck with me to the end, I want to let you in on a little secret… there is a Mumstoppable mobile app in the works!! I am SO excited about this, Mama. It’s been my dream with Mumstoppable to bring the magic of coaching to mums everywhere, and whilst I’m able to do this to some extent with this podcast, the app will enable me to bring you even more coaching goodness, whenever and wherever you need it. It’s built so that you can dip in and out of the content as and when you need to. And in a bid to make it as accessible as possible, most of the content is audio based, so you can listen whilst you’re multitasking.

Now I’m working on the app as we speak and the plan is for it to include:

• Daily affirmations to help create a positive state of mind

• Pre-recorded audio classes to help you work through your challenges at your own pace

• Digital workbooks to complete within the app, so that you can forget that pen and paper I keep asking you to dig out!

• Access to a community of like minded mums who are looking to work on themselves

• A mood tracker, so that you can plot your progression over time

• NEW themed content and challenges released every month

• LIVE group coaching calls with me, your resident expert coach

• Access to a library of coaching content

• And so so much more!

If you’re as excited as I am about this, sign up to my newsletter here to be the first to find out when we launch, in March 2024!

Woop woop!

That brings us to the end of this week’s blog! Thank you once again for joining me, and well done for spending the last 30 mins doing something just for you! 

Enjoy working through this week’s coaching corner tips, and as always, I would LOVE to hear how you’re getting on with the coaching challenge, so please feel free to send me a quick email at [email protected] or find me on Instagram at @mumstoppable_ and send me a DM or leave a comment on one of my posts. 

You will also be able to find reminders of the coaching corner tips and details of the coaching challenge on Instagram towards the end of the week.

Over the coming weeks I’ll be talking to you about challenges facing mums ranging from feeling lost and like you don’t know who you are anymore, to surviving overwhelm as a mum, to motherhood and the strains that puts on your relationships, to the struggle of returning to work. Please also feel free to email me with any challenges you’re facing which you’d like me to cover off on upcoming sessions.

If you’ve liked what you’ve read today, please do sign up to my newsletter by clicking the side bar on the left. As a thank you for signing up, you can choose to receive my FREE Self-Love Journal, which is full of gorgeous self-love exercises and a 14 day journal template for you to print and fill out. 

And more importantly, by signing up, you’re guaranteeing you’ll never miss a blog post (or Podcast episode!) as they will land directly in your inbox every Monday morning.

For now, though, have an awesome week, and remember:

I see you, Mama. 

You’ve got this. 

You are Mumstoppable!