Are you overwhelmed with your to do list? Well, today we are talking about my number one secret to keeping up as a busy mom and it's not what you think it is. In fact, we're talking about throwing out that to do list altogether and instead focusing on our most purposeful priorities. Welcome to the Intentional Mom Life with Jesus podcast. Do you desire balance and want to glorify God with your life?
Are you often up late at night conflicted between whether you accomplished enough or you are present enough with your kids? Do you wake up with big ambitious goals? Only to feel overwhelmed by all the things on your to do list? Hi, I'm Sasha Star Robertson. I know the weight of that. Stay at home mom life. It can feel like a burden to stay on top of things when you don't know how to manage your time and struggle to read your Bible.
You want structure a routine that flows and a little time to pursue things for yourself without mom guilt. But you keep telling yourself there's no time and I can't find a good schedule. Well, you found the solution on this podcast. You'll find encouragement to help you live rooted and grounded in Christ time management, tips for busy moms and mindset shifts to help you feel organized, productive and peaceful, focusing on what matters most.
So, grab your cold brew or kombucha and strap those kid into the car seat and let's jump into today's episode. Ok. Sisters. Before we dive in today, I have something super excited that I want to share with you all. And as some of you may know, I have a six month coaching program available called Intentionally Abundant Motherhood. It is incredible, but I realize that some of you may want something smaller.
Maybe you just want that first step to get started on your journey of creating a balanced life and schedule where God is at the center of it. So that is what I have created for you all. I have an offer for one off coaching calls where we are going to focus down on your most purposeful priorities. I will walk you through evaluating all the areas of your life and help you eliminate the noise and process through the mindset of focusing on a few important areas of your life.
We're talking about simplifying your focus to what matters most to you. You'll walk away from this call knowing what your top priority areas are and ones that are relevant to this season, as well as a game plan for moving forward. You'll receive a guide for journaling with God to bring him into the center of all of it and worksheets to help you really go deep on your why? Behind those focus areas and we're going to cover all of this in one hour mama.
So if you are ready to kick that to do list to the curb and simplify your life, click the link in the show notes to schedule your one hour, purposeful priorities, coaching call. All right. Now diving into the topic of today's episode, it's talking about being overwhelmed by your to do list and my number one secret to keeping up as a busy mom. And like I said, it's not what you think it is.
And before we truly dive in, I want to share a very vulnerable and very transparent story with you all because I'll be honest, my life has been a struggle lately. I have been riding this struggle bus, in fact, driving this struggle bus with blinders on essentially lately, I have definitely fallen for the schemes of the enemy.
You see, I have all of these tools, this coaching system, this knowledge to truly live a harmonious life where everything that matters to me and everything that God has called me to in the season of life gets done where I get to lay my head down at night, feeling accomplished and at peace knowing how I showed up for myself and my family and the world, but I fell away from it. I've lived in this realm for multiple years. And it's been such a beautiful and pleasant space to be in.
But earlier this year, I walked several women through this fresh start program, which is likely going to become a course soon that all of you are able to participate in. And it was phenomenal y'all. We all walked away with these incredible schedules, um routines and more so like rhythms and harmonious living is the way I really like to explain it and life was going good. And then my husband's schedule changed and we went on vacation.
And when we came back, I had started a course and started promoting and getting all of the behind the work behind the scenes work done for I am mom and just had multiple different things going on launching a podcast with my husband and then on podcast launch day, which was also our 14th anniversary. We Willy nilly up and decided to knock down a wall um in our dining room slash office between those two rooms and make it a giant living room, which created so much work in our home.
And what had happened was in this crazy month that was April that then fed into a crazier May. My life has been a whirlwind. I fell away from all of these systems and processes that I teach from these tools that I know work, right? And I got caught up in pride. I got caught up in all the things I fell for the belief that I was beyond this system that I was capable of doing more than others that I didn't have to live in obedience to the schedule or priorities that I had created.
And I know this sounds insane, right? Like, like why would you do this? And I will say, I, I believe a lot of it was to your benefit, right? Because when I started coaching, I truly believe God called me into coaching. I actually didn't have this like pain point story, right? I hadn't gone through this like struggle bus of mom life for me. Mom life was this catalyst that made everything in my life more intentional and more efficient and more productive. And I was really rocking mom life.
And I hope you hear me saying this like, not in an arrogant way, right? It was just, I was very effective and efficient at showing up for myself and my family in ways that I never had before. And God really highlighted and bolded and underlined, you know, all these things that were these skills that I had and tools that I had learned throughout my life that I was implementing. And that became the I am the intentionally abundant motherhood coaching program, right?
And he continued to further develop those skills and develop all of that for me. But I never had actually gone through and experienced that like head on the ground. Um Just chaos and struggle and overwhelm and burden of mom life and all the things until these last few months and y'all, every single day was a struggle. Every single day. I had a to do list that was a mile 23 miles long.
And everything seemed pressing everything needed to be done right now because I had this conference that had a date stamp on it like it had a time that it was happening live and then all the things that I had to do behind the scenes had to be done before after that because there were hundreds of people waiting on it. I'm in this course that every Saturday the work I don't get done like more trainings drop.
And so whatever, I don't get done, essentially like the to do list or the burden just becomes bigger, right? The backpack that's weighing me down is just so much more. And then I had my house was like a mess from not just construction but essentially completely rearranging the three almost busiest rooms of your house. And like where do all of those things go? And it led to this season of like intense decluttering and spring cleaning and organizing, which has all been phenomenal, right?
The fruits at the end of this are are incredible. But in the moment I was drowning every single day, I had to go to bed later and later because I had so much stuff to do and I was laying there anxious not able to fall asleep because I still had so much that wasn't checked off on my to do list and every morning I would wake up way too early, not getting enough sleep, living off of caffeine and sugar as I'm trying to train for these triathlons, like, just all, all the things. Right.
I'm, I'm not even going to get into how it affected health and finances and, you know, relationship dynamics with my spouse and my kids and um how I was showing up in my business and just all of these things, right. I'm pretty sure many of you can understand this, like the chores and the everything is just never ending at times or it feels like it's never ending at times. And so lately I've been going through like, how did I get here? Like, why is this happening to me?
And like I said, in the beginning, I think, and believe it is to your benefit because I've been able to really feel those pain points, right? I've been able to sit down and go back to the beginning and meet with God and pray over like, what is going on here? How did this happen and how do we get out of this? Right. Because while I've had all of these tools and everything, it's been from a different place of actually sitting in that dirty diaper if you will, right.
So, so here's uh there's a couple of points that I want to bring up to you. I've got, I've got four bullet points for you guys today. And number one is just the idea and belief. The fact truly that we play a role in creating or allowing this chaos and overwhelm in our lives. And the to do list I truly believe is a big one of them living this to do list lifestyle. It creates this, this never ending like we have to do this. We have to do that.
We should be doing this, we should be doing that and it affects our mindset so negatively that it creates this burden mindset, right? And so here, here's the way that I can see now very clearly that I created this season of stress and chaos and overwhelm in my life because I wasn't living in integrity with what matters most. I wasn't living in integrity with who I am with what my values are and what my focus is during this season of life that I'm living in.
I know a big one of those things is saying yes to too much right thinking and believing that I could take on more even though it wasn't within the sphere of those focus areas that I know I walked with God to uncovering just months prior. And one of those big things was Willy nilly building the tower without counting the cost was knocking down this wall in our home. So I want to talk a little bit about integrity. This is 0.2 here. Integrity and what it means to live in integrity.
Integrity is the title of the first lesson in the I Am coaching program and it's phenomenal and I'm going to give you a little taste of that here today. And starting with these three scripture verses. Proverbs 26 and seven says for the Lord gives wisdom from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright. He is a shield to those who walk in integrity.
The second verse that I want to share with you guys is Proverbs 11 3, the integrity of the upright guides them, but the crookedness of the treacherous destroys them. And then the third scripture verse is Proverbs 20 verse seven. The righteous who walks in his integrity, blessed are his Children after him. When I think of integrity, the old me used to think, oh, it's doing the right thing when no one is looking right or when no one is watching.
But in reality, integrity means we're living in alignment. It means we're walking the walk and talking the talk. It means we are living in accordance with our values and what matters most integrity makes me think of. The Bible project's video on Shalom where Shalom means peace, right? But it's a wholeness. It's a completeness where there's nothing missing, there's nothing broken or lacking all the different parts and pieces are working together to create this wholeness or harmony.
And when I talk about integrity, that's the definition that I really want you guys to hold on to. Because living in integrity is truly where it's at. Living in integrity is how we have all of these blessings from the Lord. Like I had just mentioned right in these different proverbs scripture verses that we went over. But it's, it's the beginning of living in accordance with what matters most to you.
And when we're not living in integrity with what matters most to us, we are living in the opposite of this shalom, this wholeness, this completeness and harmony and peace in our lives. And we are having a hand in playing or creating or allowing this chaos and overwhelm to take place in our lives, which goes back to the first point that I brought up today in this episode. And I want to go on to 0.3 because this is essentially my definition of purposeful priorities.
Some people want to argue that priorities is not a thing, it's not a plural thing. You have one priority. But as a busy mom, you know that that's not possible, right? Even if you are staying home and your home and your kids are like the thing for you. Like let's just umbrella that under like stay at home mom, right? There are so many priorities. You have the priority of meeting your kids needs and being there for them emotionally and than physically present. And taking care of them.
But then you also have your home as the responsibility to steward and take care of and maybe you have multiple kids. Right. That, that's pulling you into multiple different directions and then you have your spouse and you've got to cook dinner and do laundry and all of these other things. Right. Priorities is where we're living as a mom. Right. But we have all of these other areas of life. We have areas of hobbies, we have areas like health and finances and business and the list goes on, right?
I have all of these areas of life in the Shalom Circle test which is in the life and goals planner. But it's something that I start out with working with each one of my clients is going over this Shalom Circle test and evaluating all of these areas of your life and figuring out what are the areas that you are struggling with the most right now or what are the areas that God is calling you to focus on right now in this season of life that you're living in?
And this is you, this is not what your mom thinks or what the other ladies in the Facebook group are doing or what the other ladies at church are doing. This is you going to God and, and asking him, what are these focus areas that I should be focusing on, you know, paying attention to right now in my life. What should I be pouring into? What should I be giving my yes to but not just my, yes, my best. Yes. Right. How do you want me showing up and what areas of life matter most right now?
And when we look at these purposeful priorities and we have a good understanding of them and we bring God into that, it's where we're able to live in integrity and how we're able to overcome where we have our own hand in allowing or creating overwhelm in our lives. And so I shared this story with you guys at the beginning because it's a place that I've gone back to.
And honestly, I go back to it like usually every 3 to 6 months, um definitely every year at a, at a very minimum, but every 3 to 6 months, any time I notice my season or schedule changing, I have to go back to these purposeful priorities. Any time I notice that there's this chaos or overwhelm showing up in my life that I'm not living in peace in the peace of God. I go back to these purposeful priorities and check where am I living in integrity and where am I not?
And so this is what I'm inviting you into when I shared about those purposeful priorities. One hour calls at the beginning is I want to walk with you through processing that stuff out through doing that evaluation for picking your most purposeful priorities.
And then give you those journaling prompts to bring it to God and give you those worksheets to go really, really deep on why those focus areas matter so that you can start living in accordance with them, living in integrity and eliminating that chaos and overwhelm in your lives, sisters. This is the first step in creating a balanced life and schedule. Ok? And then this brings me to point number four that I want to make today.
It could be because in the beginning I talked about the to do list, right? And you might be like freaking out like, ok, well, if I figure out my priorities, like, how does that get rid of my to do list? Right? So there is one place that I really see a benefit of a to do list and that is in the brain dump, right? I have a client, I was just talking to the other day.
Um And she was saying it's usually at night before she goes to bed, she'll get out a notebook or do it in her phone where she'll kind of do a little brain dump and get everything out of her head. And then that becomes kind of like her to do list for the next day. But it is a space where she's able to utilize that brain dump to get it all out. So she can create that peaceful mind space and be able to go to sleep at night.
And then the next day, she can look at those and prioritize those in a way that is relevant to her most purposeful priorities where she can process them through the four Ds that I talked about on a previous episode here and um and figure out what she can drop what she can delegate, but just getting it out of your head, right. The brain dump is the effect place that I see where you can then turn that into a to do list.
Or sometimes when we brain dump, we could also like label that as a to do list. But when we are living on this to do list lifestyle, when you have a piece of paper right here next to you or a phone or something where you're just like these are the things I need to do and you keep adding to them. It's never ending.
But most of the things that we carry around in our mental to do list in our head are we write down on our physical to do list somewhere are things that can be turned into routines and rhythms that become a harmony and balance in our life versus this chaos and overwhelm that comes from this to do list lifestyle.
So sisters, if this to do list lifestyle is something you're ready to kick to the curb, sit down and process what purposeful priorities are for you in this season, pray over them and if you want help, I've got this coaching call ready for you, click the link in the show notes and I will see you on that call. Hey, hey sister, I hope this podcast episode has blessed you. And if so I would love, if you would scroll down and leave a review, I love and cherish each and every one of them.
And it's going to help Apple podcasts to push this podcast out to more mamas just like you that need this encouragement and these practical tips to move forward in creating a balance in their mom life will.