Ep 63: When you’re out of energy for your dreams

Welcome to the Mom On Purpose Podcast. I’m Lara Johnson and I’m here to teach you how to get out of your funk, be in a better mood, and play more with your kids. Manage your home better. Get your to-do list done and live your life on purpose with my proven method. This is possible for you, and I’ll show you how. You’re not alone anymore. We’re in this together. Hello! Do you want to hear something so sad? I just recorded an entire episode for you and it didn’t save, ugh. You know, sometimes that happens. I will tell you; I had a coach many years ago tell me, Elizabeth Salzer is her name. I’m so grateful for her. I remember her telling me about something that didn’t save. She’s like, you know, I just have a firm belief that second time’s always better than the first, so I’m going to trust that. I’m going to trust that the second time is better than the first for you. So, here we go, round two. I hope that you’re going to enjoy this. So, I did turn off my other microphone, so hopefully you can still hear me. So, last week I talked about the demands of life and when you feel like running away and I really love that episode. If you haven’t heard it yet, I would highly recommend that you go and listen to it. This one’s going to kind of build off of that one. Of course, you can listen to this one as a standalone one, but I will reference last week’s episode as well, as we’re talking about some of these steps. So, I wanted to start with, well, let’s start with a, you know, this episode is for you is if you feel like you’re trudging forward, and you have no energy for your big dreams and it’s like you feel tired in your bones and sleep doesn’t seem to be fixing it. You’ll also know that this episode is for you if you have a lot of projects that need to be done. But you keep running out of steam before you even get to the projects because you’re so busy maintaining things in your life or if you start the project and you run out of steam in the middle of it, you have a bunch of half-done projects. The other thing that I’ll mention here is that if you feel like you’ve had a lot of weird body stuff come up and you’ve gone to the doctor for it and you’ve talked with them, and all the tests come back fine and you’re not really sure what it is. But the weird body stuff just kind of keeps happening. I will say, I’m not going to dive into that. That just usually is a symptom that your energy is low and that you’re holding onto a lot of stress. That is something that we’ll have to do a whole other episode on that because it’s such a fun topic to talk about, like how your body stores emotions. But for today, what I really wanted to focus on was this war is the issue of like your energy, like being able to troubleshoot when you are low on that quote unquote resource, the resource of energy. So, when I was thinking about this episode, I was thinking about the board game Settlers of Catan. If you ever play with my older sister whose name is Candace. She thinks she’s like a world dominator and she thinks the game should be called Settlers of Catandace. Which, I will give her credit, she does win a lot. So, this is a game that we’ve always loved to play, you know, as siblings. It’s been really fun as my kids are starting to get older, where we can sit and play with them, you know, once the littles go to bed. And it’s just a really enjoyable game. What I like about this game is there is like the luck of the game, the circumstances where you can’t really control things, but there is a lot of strategy that goes into it. So, you have this whole board that’s laid out. It almost like you have these hexagon pieces that are all kind of linked together almost. So, it has a beehive and each of these like hexagon shaped tiles, I guess we’ll call them, are different resources. You have the resource of brick, wood, sheep, grain, and ore, all laid out. And wherever you place your settlement or like your little house, because you’re trying to settle all this land. In order to get points to win the game, wherever you settle, that’s the resource you’re next to. If you roll the dice and you get the number that’s on top of that tile, then you get that resource. So, say if I rolled the dice and I got a number six and I’m sitting next to wood and, on that wood, I had this number six. And so, I would get wood. So, imagine for just a second that you get a lot of resource on or you cannot use to build a road, and roads are like the building block of this game. In order to build a road, you need wood and brick. So, say you keep, like, Luck of the Die, you just keep drawing, like, ore, all this ore, but you cannot build any kind of road. So, at this point, this is like the circumstance of your life. You don’t have this resource. And now you have to start thinking strategically about how am I going to get this resource? So, you have to start thinking, okay, well, I can work with others. I can trade once I trade, then I can go, you know, build a settlement in these areas to hopefully get more of the wood and the bricks so I can build roads in the future. But you’re like thinking forward while also thinking in the present. What I love about this is that it is so much like life where we are constantly thinking about our resources. A lot of times it’s time and money. I want to talk about the resource of energy for this episode. Where there are things that you are having to plan for in the future, as well as current day in order to accomplish stuff, but you need the resource of energy, and you may not have that resource right now. So, at this point you have to start thinking really strategically, like you’ve got to start troubleshooting. How am I going to get the energy? So, when we are looking at this and we’re starting to troubleshoot around this area. So, there’s four things that we consider when we’re troubleshooting for this resource. The first is to decrease what you’re doing. The second is to delegate what you’re doing, or you need to do. The third is to increase the things that fuel you. And the fourth is to create energy exchanges. Now, let’s talk about the first one, decreasing what you are doing. I find that this one’s really hard for my clients because everything on their list feels so mission critical. Of course, you need to feed your children and I support you in that that I would argue is a have to, unless you want to go to jail, and I know you love your kids. Deep down you want to feed them. But there are other things on that list that I find create have to lists in our brains that aren’t really a have to right now, in this moment. And so, when we’re thinking about like the resource of energy and we’re trying to troubleshoot, like, how do we get more of this to accomplish the things that I want to do? I feel called to do, I need to do, I need to think about how do I decrease? So, there are physical things that you can always cut back on. And I will say that for most brains, the more stressed you are, the more your brain will add things to your list and make them feel priority. So, I always use the example of like the more stressed I am, the more I notice my baseboards. And I’ll say like right now, because I’m on to myself about the baseboards, there is a very specific spot in the doorway going into my closet where one of my kids seemed to like wipe their nasty fingers. Like, even as I’m describing this, I can feel it in my body. I’m like, oh, that’s bugging me. It’s not a priority at all, but my brain is making it a priority. So, when we’re low on the resource of energy. It’s important to start asking ourselves, is this necessary right now? And I am amazed at when we say necessary and right now your brain will start to chip away and decrease what you’re needing to do. And the other thing I’ll say with this is there are physical things, for sure, that you can cut off your list. If you are looking for more energy, there’s a million things that you can cut off. And start looking at those things very creatively. At one point, I took away all the top sheets of my kids because I didn’t have the energy when they wet the bed to wash a top sheet because it just made the washing machine too full. And so, I took that away. They all have fleece blankets that I could easily put into the washing machine instead of having like a big comforter that I needed to wash since they didn’t have a top sheet. And the funny thing is, even now. They all hate top sheets, so I always laugh it’s because I took their top sheets away when I was very low on energy when they were younger. So, that’s an example of decreasing what you’re doing in a very physical sense. But there’s also decreasing things like stress and worry. And I’m always amazed at how much energy is zapped when I’m worrying about something. And I’ll say it’s hard to decrease worry. But it’s even harder to increase trust. And well, the way I think about this is when my brain starts to spiral and it wants to go to this place of a worry cycle, I’ll usually do something very physical, like I’ll stand still and close my eyes and imagine my feet feeling really grounded and like my shoulders are back or like I’ll put my hand on my heart and I just have a conversation with myself on like, okay, I know you want to worry about this right now. I choose not to. I am saving my energy for something else. So, I’m just going to trust that this is going to work out. I trust that when the answer needs to come, it will. And I trust no matter what, I will always have my back and be nice to myself. And like going back and like really practicing that trust is very loving. And you’ll find that it even gives you a little bit of a fuel boost when you really start talking to your brain and your body with that kind of compassion and you start to actively trust more. That’s not to say you’re sticking your head in the sand and you’re not ever like considering your options. I’m just saying that as you are leaning into that trust, what you’re doing is co-creating with God and with the universe and allowing. Like the magic and the miracles taking place instead of spinning and feeling like you’re on your own. So, the second thing is to delegate what you’re doing or what you need to do. And there’s kind of two ways that you can go about this. I’m actually, going to make that three. There’s three ways you can go about this. You can hire someone; you can train up. Now, when we’re looking at hiring, even though I love mowing my lawn, it is so therapeutic to me. I knew that I needed those hours of energy back in my week with the phase that I’m at with my kids. And so, even though I used to put them in like the backpack and I’d mow the lawn, even now, I don’t really have time for that, and that’s okay because I do have the money to hire a neighbor kid to do it. They do an exceptional job. It’s a very low cost for something that I can easily give myself hours of my life back each week. So, that’s an example of hiring, but I know that sometimes money is an issue. And it has been for me, you know, for many years, like as I’ve been raising my kids. And so, for a long time is like delegating was actually trading and what a beautiful blessing it is to create a community of friends and family where you can trade. There was, I think it was about a year, a friend, she was in the neighborhood. She had kids that were about the same age as mine. We exchanged dinners. It was like as soon as we were, like, making a dinner, it was so much easier to just double the recipe and trade dinner for that evening and only have to cook, like, two times during the weekdays. And it was a really fun thing because I learned so many amazing meals from her. And, you know, we created like our own, like stipulations on like, we wanted a vegetable with it for dinner or, you know, something healthy to go with it or we wanted more whole foods. And so, it just became more of like an enjoyable thing because we were cooking for each other. So, that’s an example of being able to delegate. I was able to live my life through the trading process where I was able to give myself hours of my life back. Because I was cooking less, and I was doing less dishes and I could just be more present with my kids. The other thing would be to train up. If you think about this in terms of business, instead of hiring somebody that knows nothing about your business, you can train people to fulfill a new role or need within your business. Now, you can do this in a lot of ways. I would say the first thing that comes to mind is maybe with a spouse, you’re able to train them up to understand the mental and physical load that goes into the management of a home. My husband will tell you that as we’ve worked on this over the years, I will literally stop a show that we’re watching in order to point something out so that he can see it in real time. And like, do you see what’s happening here? How the man is just sitting here. The woman is stressing about these things like very real time. I’m sure it drives them crazy, but it’s amazing because he’s an incredible person. Like he has like such a desire to work in partnership for our family, his brain just doesn’t see it. Like it is not like a masculinity thing. It is just like a neurodivergent brain where he doesn’t see those things. And so, I really spend a lot of time communicating about those things because that desire is there. I will also say like with my kids, having to train them up as well. Again, we have a lot of neurodivergency within our house and so it takes some time to do those things, but being able to train them up is a way for you to get. I will say that a lot of that your resource of energy back long term and if that seems like really hard, and that feels more like a demand to train up your kids, look for shortcuts. As much as I love the earth, I want to do good by the earth, we do paper plates because being able to train up kids to clean their plates, you know, like clean them from the table is just throwing them away and it’s not added steps for me. So, again, think really creatively about how you’re delegating and things that need to be done because there are a lot of shortcuts that you can take. So, the third step is being able to increase things that fuel you. So, the first two, like energy is already going out of you like the resource, and we’re just trying to slow the flow a little bit. When we’re thinking about increasing, what we’re doing is trying to bring the resource of energy and energy. Increase that within your own body. And when I’m thinking about increasing, the thing that I always think about is finding the fun or the joyful things every day. And most people at this point, I’ll say, oh my gosh, well, I don’t have time for that. I’d love to do a girl’s night. It’s so hard scheduling. There’s a lot of excuses or reasons why you can’t do something fun and joyful. It’s usually because there’s an underlying belief that it needs to be planned or it needs to be long, or you don’t know what’s fun anymore. And so, if that’s starting to happen in your brain, as I’m talking about this, I want you to be aware. That those internal beliefs are stopping you from seeing what’s fun right now and what could be joyful for you when I’m looking at finding the fun, feeling joyful, bringing energy back to me, they’re very small things. It might be like making a list of all the things I have to do and thinking, okay, what feels fun, what actually feels enjoyable to start with, and if the answer to that is nothing, then I think, okay, what would be fun to do? And sometimes my brain’s like, well, I don’t know. I’ve never had fun before in my life. I don’t know. It’s so dramatic. And that’s where you really get to just spend time and experiment and be like, okay, well let’s try turning on some music from high school. It used to be fun in high school. What about now? And it’s almost like you go down memory lane and that feels really fun. There’s other things where like I was cooking dinner one day and as I was cooking dinner, I was really irritated and I was like, okay. How can I make this more fun for me? And I thought, okay, well, I’ve got rice. So, I started squishing the rice down in the bowl. I’m like, okay, now what? And I just flipped the bowl over and it became a little body. And so, I just started grabbing things around the kitchen to make like a little person out of their rice. It was fun for me. It was something so simple that literally took me maybe 30 seconds to cut up blueberries to make a mouth and a nose and, you know, put some broccoli as hair, whatever. And it was so funny too, because, you know, the differences in children are always so starkly different. Like one of them sits down and starts giggling and was like, oh mom, that’s so funny. And then the other one sat down, and they were like, Ugh. I don’t even like these foods together, but the whole point of that was like, it was fun for me, regardless of their response. And even it was fun just seeing the difference in responses. And it just made me chuckle a little bit. But the other thing I’ll say is that. If you are trying to increase your energy back, the resource of energy back, this is a space where there’s no comparison. Like, what feels fun for me? I don’t typically do anything with food because that’s not fun for me or joyful. It’s usually a very stressful situation for me when I’m trying to do meals. I will also say that, I had a client once where she really felt like she wished she was more playful with her kids. She was also the mom whose kids were in a lot of sports. She was very athletic herself. She coached teams. She was at every single practice and game and was very involved with her kids, old and young kids. And I was so impressed with that because I’ll never be that mom. Ever like sports don’t come out of these hands, neither do anything beautiful. So, if you’re the crafting mom, if you’re the art mom, if you’re the book mom, if you’re the sports mom, like whatever feels fun to you, that’s great. Incorporate that because it’s about you feeling fun and inviting your kids along the journey, not like being the quote unquote fun mom and doing whatever you see someone else doing on social media. The biggest thing here is just really giving yourself a chance to feel joyful because what that does is it. It gets like positive energy back. It gets the ball rolling. You’ll start building that momentum and that turns into a very enjoyable self-motivation. So, the last thing that I’ll include in this list is creating energy exchanges. And I’ll say that this is probably the most underutilized and one that I always have to remind myself, but I do it pretty naturally, but I wanted to share it with you in case. This is a new concept for you. Now, I know when my resource of energy is really low, I’ll immediately start thinking about, okay, exchange. What can I exchange? It may be that it’s too much to shower and do my hair, so what’s the energy exchange? I have enough energy to shower and pull my hair up. That would be an exchange of energy. So, I’m constantly looking at like, how much do I have left in my energy reserve and making decisions based on that energy reserve. So, another example might be, okay, at this point I can go take a nap or take a bath, or I can respond to text messages, but I only have energy for something. And it’s like, I will choose nap every single time. And I just have a firm belief that people that know and love me and know that the way that I work and the circumstances of our life know that they may have to text me twice if I haven’t responded, if it’s something more, you know, mission critical. Or it takes me a week to respond back, and I will say that my friends, like that’s a common thing among all of us and our love for each other never wanes. That’s like standard practice because we’re all drawn to each other, and we all have that mutual understanding. So, if that feels really stressful for you, like with a friend or you feel like they’re going to be offended. Definitely have that conversation with them and also recognize that may not be the friendship that continues on with you either way is okay, but just recognize that you can have a lot of love regardless and always be keeping in tune with where your energy reserve is. Another way that you can think about this is say you’re like stuck somewhere where you only have a certain amount of battery left on your phone and you know that you need to make a really important phone call, you’re not going to sit and be watching shows on your phone because it’s going to drain your battery. You know that you need to keep your battery in order to make that important phone call. It’s the same kind of thing. In that moment, you’re exchanging the pleasure of watching a show with the necessity of making a phone call. And so, when you’re looking at your energy reserves. It may be something like I’m going to leave clean clothes in a basket in exchange to have enough energy to make dinner. That might be the exchange that I’m making. And at this point, this is where you really get to start making conscious choices. I will say that in this space, when I’m doing energy exchanges. I mean, in general, it’s always a good practice, but especially in this space where I’m making energy exchanges, I am not allowed to shame myself. That’s just a rule that I have, that no matter what, I will not shame myself for the clean clothes sitting in the basket because that was a conscious choice that I made. And so, when I’m doing those things, I’m always being so compassionate with myself, not shaming myself for not having enough of this energy. Just, hey, this is the resource, just like going back to Settlers of Catan. This is the resource that I am lacking right now. And that’s okay. There are other ways that I can build this up. So, there you have it. I hope that was useful for you as you were thinking about your own resource of energy and how you can start troubleshooting in order to bring more of that into your space and into your realm so that you can continue to work towards your purpose and whatever your big dreams are. And of course, if you’re ready to dive into this one on one with me, let me know. You can go down below to the show notes. You can always click on the link down there where you can get on my schedule for a consultation. This consultation is an hour and I promise you; you will walk away completely renewed, having so much clarity in how to move forward. Whether or not we choose to work together at this point doesn’t matter. I want to give you the gift of that consultation so that you have that roadmap for yourself. All right, have a wonderful week. Talk to you soon. Thank you for listening. Please share, review, and subscribe to this podcast so that together we can live life on purpose.