We've all heard of the dreaded Mummy-Guilt, and it seems to be part and parcel of being a mum in todays world of being busy and kid chaos. But does it need to be?
You may have thought that being a mum means accepting that you're going to feel guilty about taking time for yourself / juggling your housework / juggling your other children / juggling your husband / spending your hard-earned cash.... but it doesn't have to be, and here's how to change it!!
Once we follow the 3 simple steps I outline below, we start to realise that a happy mum is actually a better mum. And the better we want to be at our motherhood commitments, the more we need to focus on our own happiness and life balance. Once we truly understand this, looking after ourselves becomes much easier to do and we can wave goodbye to the mummy-guilt once and for all.
Step 1 - Believe that looking after ourselves isn't just important, it's essential!
Looking after ourselves, taking time for ourselves and spending money on ourselves isn't selfish, it's essential, and heres why... As mums, the only thing we really, desperately, need to do, is to teach our kids how to be happy.
How will they ever learn how to appreciate life, look after themselves, value their own happiness and invest in their future, unless we show them it's important? If we want our children to grow up strong, independent, successful individuals, believing that anything is possible, we need believe this is important for ourselves.
It is a fact that children mimic the behaviour of those around them, their parents most of all. This is why children from violent homes tend to grow up to accept violent relationships and the children of successful entrepreneurs tend to be more successful in business. We are their role models, their advocates and unless we show them what's important in life, how will they ever know?
We also need to catch ourselves when we are starting to feel like we 'should' be doing / feeling / being something which we are not. When we notice a 'should' in our thoughts we need to STOP and try to find out what emotion this is covering.
Often we can feel like we 'should' be feeding our kids something different, or we 'should' be spending more quality time with them or we 'shouldn't' be doing something nice for ourselves, but without our own Life Balance and without step 2 below, we will never actually know what we are trying to achieve and we will continue to keep beating ourselves up for not being perfect and doing it all!
Step 2 - Design our future.
Once we start to value ourselves enough to know that our own happiness is important. We need to really consider what we want from our own future. What kind of person do we want to be? What kind of mum do we want our children to look back and remember? What do we want our routine to look like so we can get that quality time for ourselves and for our children? What do we want to look back and be proud of at the end of our life away from just being a mum?
By designing our future, and making sure we are taking steps towards it, we gain a better life balance, a sense of purpose, and we can fit in all that we WANT to do alongside all that we NEED to do. We future proof ourselves - and our emotions - and we teach our children to follow their own dreams towards a life of adventure, success and fulfilment.
Once we know our ideals, our future and what we want from life, our subconscious will help us find a way to get there. We are happier, calmer, more fulfilled and ultimately we turn into amazing mothers and role-models for our children. What they learn from us as they grow, becomes their drive, their motivation and their own belief that they can achieve an adult life of their choosing.
There is no mummy-guilt in that!
Step 3 - Take the action needed to get started
Now we know that our own happiness is vital to ourselves and to those around us, and that taking action on our own goals and visualising our own future will actually reduce the mummy-guilt. We now need to start to take the steps required to move us closer to our dream.
The key to doing this is to start small, prioritise small chunks of time to focus on ourselves and celebrate our successes along the way. If we can get our subconscious minds on board, we effortlessly start to see opportunities popping up taking us closer to our goals during our every day lives. And if we truly believe in our own future, we start to take small risks and make different actions we would never had done before.
If we have really worked hard on visualising our future and knowing exactly what we want, we may feel overwhelmed at the distance we need to go to get there. However, if we can break down each step into even smaller steps and we keep working towards it one mini-goal at a time, before we know it - in amongst all the daily chaos of being a mum - we look back and realise that we are actually a lot closer to our dream than we were when we started.
The power of the phrase 'one step at a time' is undeniable and this is exactly what I teach in my FREE guide, the Mindset Map.
Download it here and look forward to a life of happiness, calm and fulfilment, despite the daily chaos which comes with being a mum.