Treating your home and motherhood with a CEO mindset will make you feel less indecisive and more empowered to break free from whatever feels overwhelming in your motherhood…
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This episode discusses:
Why you should treat your motherhood with a CEO mindset as a mom.
The most important lesson I learned as a new business owner.
Why our culture doesn’t empower us to become better moms.
Questions you should ask yourself to evaluate your problem areas.
How to start thinking and acting as a CEO in your home.
Don’t have time to listen? Here’s the episode all typed out:
Simply Freeing? Motherhood doesn’t feel simply freeing when you’re on autopilot in a home filled with chaos, stress and a ton of pressure. In order to survive the chaos we NEED the right strategies and mindset to embrace the simple and enjoy the few short years we have with our kids. I believe that we are called to see that we CAN rise up, get out of our head, shut out the expectations of the world and what mom life is supposed to be like and change what’s not working so that motherhood is fulfilling. Join me as we discuss all things motherhood, homeschooling, minimalism, faith and health. My mission is to help you embrace simplicity and find freedom in your motherhood. I’m Jackie from Whole9Family and this is the “Simply Freeing” Podcast.
Today I wanted to talk about why it is super important that we think and act like CEOs in our home as moms. A CEO is in charge, they set the tone for the company and take charge either from an office or a computer screen. They know how to direct. They may have a team and delegate to that team. In corporate America, as you climb the ladder, you typically take on more of a visionary role as a CEO. You aren’t the worker bee you once were. You get to make big decisions and watch as your company grows and see the vision come to fruition. Hopefully your company has a great, hard work ethic and hopefully you have employees that really love working for you.
The CEO mentality is a huge shift for some of us as moms who are constantly feeling overwhelmed in our home. We don’t really feel like we’re in charge. We're beating ourselves up mentally.
What does being a CEO have to do with being a mom? It has everything to do with being a mom!
I literally started a baby sign language business having absolutely no business training whatsoever. That experience was mind blowing for me. I had to make all the decisions and I looked to everyone else to make them which didn’t make any sense because it was my company. It was my idea. It finally dawned on me one day that there was no one as invested in the company as I was. I was the one in charge. I learned an important lesson that year. Making decisions was hard for me. Being indecisive was a huge part of who I was. CEO's don't look to their employees to make decisions.
Owning that baby sign language business and jumping into being a business owner when I had no business experience, I can without a doubt say that I'm thankful for it because I learned so much. The job itself didn't really help bring in the income we needed. It was a startup and my house was a cluttered disaster so those two things do not really mix well together. I never felt that I had time to work on it but it taught me a powerful lesson…
The CEO mentality should not be reserved for CEOs. Your family deserves to have a mom who's really in charge. You can say you're in charge all you want. You can even tell your kids that but they are going to know if you're really in charge by the way your home is run.
Can you really blame us as moms for being indecisive? Just think about how bombarded we are in our culture. We see how others act on social media. We're overloaded with information on how to handle our problems. The television tells us what our lives should look like. We are so easily influenced by other people and that causes us to continue being indecisive. When we're indecisive, we're not acting like CEOs. Indecisiveness makes us lack confidence and it makes us hesitant and fearful in whatever decisions we're making.
Now I want you to think about your own home. What is the environment like in your own home? Are you able to set the tone? Do your children respect you? Do you work as a team with your spouse? Do you have boundaries set up for your kids so that they know exactly what they should be doing? This episode came about because I was not acting like the CEO of my home and even still, I'm constantly trying to implement more structure and better systems in our home.
As moms, we get comfortable in our home and we don't really think of it as being a place of hard work. We think of our homes as a safe place for us to relax and to just “be” but our kids are looking up to us for leadership, direction, boundaries, instruction, routine and consistency.
Having a CEO mindset in your home is so important as your family grows. If you don't know how to be in charge, chaos will reign, I can promise you that, especially if you lean more towards being a laid-back person. There's a good chance that you need to change up what you're doing if you're feeling discouraged with the way things have been.
There are so many decisions that have to be made as a mom each and every day. If you don’t have that CEO mentality, you’re always going to be second guessing every decision. Did I make the right choice? Maybe I should ask my spouse? Maybe I should run it by a friend and get her advice or maybe I should ask my parents? When you’re second-guessing yourself and you’re asking others to give you the answers, sometimes you find yourself taking action on things that deep down you’re not really comfortable with. You find yourself in situations where you feel completely incompetent instead of confident and sure of yourself. Sometimes second-guessing yourself means that you end up talking through a problem many many times and you can’t seem to take action without talking through it. Deep down you already know the answer. You already know what you have to do but you’re forever on the fence. As a mom, you can’t stay on the fence. You have to jump off, be authoritative, dive in and establish the right boundaries, rules and expectations in your homes, even if it looks messy at first and even if you don’t know what the heck you’re doing. You have to start somewhere. (I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be making decisions with your spouse. You should. But the decisions that need to be made together are usually the major ones.)
With Covid especially, we have become so worn out. We’re having less breaks. There is a lot of fear. There is so much change. The election is coming. There is just a lot of uneasiness and tension and life is really hard right now. But some of you have the weight of the world on your shoulders and it’s so unnecessary. You shouldn’t have to spend that much time worrying about the things that are happening in your home. You should be spending more time investing in your kids...spending time on what’s really important.
If you’re feeling like thanks a lot, my house is chaotic, not what? I think this is where many of us fail. We want to do something so badly but we don’t know where to start. We’ve seen ourselves fails over and over again and we’ve given up without realizing it. We don’t know where to start so we don’t start at all or we start taking action in the wrong places and begin to feel overwhelmed.
The best advice I have for you is to start small. Think about the biggest stressor you have in life and start there. If your biggest stressor is you home, focus on decluttering. If it’s your children’s behavior, work on that. If it’s your marriage, devote time to it. Sometimes we have to start taking action even if we don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. I saw drastic changes in my life when I started changing my mindset. That was my first action step. I realized that I was giving my family leftovers by devoting so much of my time in the wrong places. I realized that I was giving them leftovers, because my priorities were out of whack.
If you’re regularly finding yourself thinking thoughts like this like this...
What’s the point? I’ll never have time to finish. Why bother? Typical. This is Just like me to act this way.
Start here. Figure out what is causing you to think this way and start from there. Figure out your biggest stressor in your life and work on that. Pray for wisdom. Pray that you can be given the grace to change your thinking and be motivated to take action from there.
Being a CEO should not be reserved for the workforce. It should be a mentality that moms have. Taking your home and treating it like it’s the most important job in the world and doing everything that you can to get better at it…To know that you are going to make mistakes. To ask for forgiveness when you do and stop giving up, putting yourself down and start doing something about it. That is where you need to be. You have to get off the fence!
I hope that this episode inspired you today to rise up and think about the way your home is run. What small change do you need to make to get the ball rolling and become more like a CEO and less like an employee looking for constant direction?
If you haven’t already joined the Simply Freeing Podcast Podcast Community Facebook group, I’d love to see you there! I want to talk about this some more. I’m going to be posting some questions about being a CEO and what that looks like as a mom. I know there are so many moms out there that are struggling with feeling like their home is complete chaos and they don’t know what to do. They are doing the same things over and over again and not seeing any results. That’s not a good place to be and it doesn’t have to be that way. The Simply Freeing Podcast Community is a safe place to discuss the topics that are brought up in this podcast.
To learn more about me and the resources I’ve created to help you in your motherhood, head to whole9family.com. See you next week friends!