3 Ways to be a Busy Mom and Make Time for What You Love with Heather Steinker
Studies show that most women suffer from lower self esteem for at least three years after having kids. The word mom tends to define women instead of becoming a role that they play. This week’s guest, Heather Steinker started chaos and cookies to keep moms from crumbling and helps them find their sweet spot. Whether that's starting a new business, going back to school, or getting healthier. If you want to learn how to approach your to do list without stress and find the balance between your role as a parent and you as a creative, ambitious, then this episode is for you.
Who is Heather Steinker?
As a busy mom of three, a wife to a traveling hubby, and keeping it weird in Austin, Texas, it's safe to say that Heather's life is far from boring. Running a household with three young kids take strategy and a system to keep things moving like a well oiled machine. After many moms came to her asking “how do you do it? I swear you have more time in the day than anyone else.” Heather wanted to show them a way.
So she created Chaos ‘N Cookies to help busy mompreneurs stress less and save time through helpful tools and systems to increase productivity in their lives. Heather teaches her clients to be more efficient in their homes, or running their businesses, working smarter and not harder. She's also a certified coach for a premier virtual fitness and nutrition program, has a background in marketing, and hosts the Chaos ‘N Cookies podcast which ranked number eighty in parenting on the USA charts.
The Learning Curve of Life Balance
Heather describes herself as a “simplifier,” meaning she makes things as simple as she can. She says her “brain thinks a little bit differently functions a little bit differently. It's just I process a lot of things all at once easily.” But multitasking doesn’t come that easy to everyone, trying to do all of the things all at once can be super overwhelming, especially with kids or businesses in that picture. Heather makes things like that less overwhelming because she’s learned that “you kind of have to pivot and kind of bob and weave as you go.” She has systems in place in case of situations coming up, “either someone could come in and help whether that be a babysitter, whether that be your husband or sister, friend and make it to where it'll take some stress off of mom.” Having systems in her life, down to things like pantry organization, is what brings Heather peace because there’s a sense of order.
Through learning what worked and didn’t work in her own life, Heather is able to help busy, working, moms simplify their own lives through “mostly either learning their systems like social media and I do a lot of visuals and really break down, things like that. And then also on the home space, I have a family playbook where it's literally every detail known to man in a book, where if someone was like, where's the mac and cheese? It's page four, like making people a little bit more self sufficient. It's all in one place. And if you can't find it, here's the three places that you can find it.”
Things like this don’t just happen overnight though. It took a lot of time and work for Heather to find the right systems. She says the “first thing you need to know is yourself and how you process information. I did this business course and it was crazy the way they had us start, which was through an enneagram test and a human design test. I did the process and I learned that I'm an enneagram three, wing too, I am a perfectionist. And I also know how I like to process. I look for invitations, I don't take the initiative. By nature, I'm a recovering people pleaser for most because you have to set some boundaries. And then I'm also a projector, which is that Human Design piece, which is I gain my self worth or it fills me up when I help others.” So it’s really about learning what works best for you based on how you process information. And then look really closely within yourself at how you like your space and your home to look and feel, “because if there's a place for everything, and it doesn't belong on the counter, it belongs on this shelf here. Is that going to bother you? And if it does, you probably need to put that in your plan.”
Your systems should also be ever-evolving based on your life and your current needs. When the pandemic hit, it changed the way a lot of us lived, including Heather. Pre-pandemic, her husband was frequently traveling for work, they had help at home with the kids, and systems in place for that lifestyle. But, when things changed, like her kids and husband always being home, she had to adapt and find new systems that would still allow her to take care of her needs, both personally and in her business, while taking care of her family and home’s needs as well.
For instance, “we had a system at our old house, and then we got a new house and everything's laid out differently. The kids would just plop everything on this countertop, right by the sink, it's gonna get wet, I don't know if it's important paper. They literally dump it and walk away. So in this house, we have hooks. So I'm like, put your thing on the hook. We have a little checklist, when you come in, do your backpack, put your lunchbox over here, take all the important paperwork here, and then go hang your crap up, get it off my floor, because I'm tripping over it. And so those systems kind of came into play.” Heather also has paper piles for each member of the family and she goes through those piles once a week, getting rid of trash, paying bills, etc. and she has different hubs for different things. She was able to create those new systems and stick with them because she consciously plans out her time and how it should be spent, “I really need to be creative, like laundry day looks like this, this day looks like that. And really plan it out and stick with it. Because if you don't keep up with it, then it gets undone.”
Making New Habits Effortless
Habits become our second nature, we don’t even have to think about what we do, we just do it, especially in our own homes. So first, take a step back and look at what you do as a habit. What do you do right when you get up in the morning? What do you want to change about it? “Maybe you want to start making your bed every day,” so you have to fit that into your schedule and start creating that habit.
Pay attention to the things that are the most important, the things that maybe take you longer to do. Heather drives her husband insane because “I place things in the house. He's like you just leave everything around. No, there's a reason why I put it there. I'm creating a pile for myself. Because when I go back to my room, I can grab it as I go. It's a visual reminder that the stuff goes there, because I'm lazy. And I'm not going to go back and forth. Until I'm done with my space, like I'm done with what I'm doing.” Even with her kid’s stuff, she puts it all into a pile on the path to their rooms.
And start being aware of “exactly what you do throughout your day and writing it down. How much time am I spending on social media? How much time am I spending on my emails? Is there a busier time that you're getting them where you can just focus on that? So you're not getting distracted by like, shiny object syndrome.” Logging exactly what you’re doing helps keep you from going down the rabbit hole of social media or emails that just waste time. Even things like “how long it takes you to cook, how are you cooking? And then looking at the gaps. Where can I make improvements? Did I really need to do that? And I would log it for a week, and see what you're doing everyday all day.”
You can even start setting a timer for yourself or noticing that you’re doing some things too much or too little, so you change your schedule to make it more effective. Heather and her family even set a timer for dinner, because otherwise they get wrapped in and spend over an hour at the dinner table. “So when the timer is up, it's time to be finished. Let's get it done because we need to stay on schedule, otherwise they'll push their bedtime backwards and create morning problems for us because we're tired. And it all rolls in to the next day.”
Heather even makes things like timers fun for her kids, she bought cute hourglasses for things like spelling, and they like seeing the sand fall, but still understand that it is still a timer and they’ve responded to that type of structure. Having that structure in place forces you to focus for that amount of time, whether your kids are in timeout or you’re setting limits in your work schedule. The predictability brings comfort, we know what’s coming. The reason Heather came up with the idea for her playbook is because her clients usually notice the need “after something has happened, that they're like, I could have used that. For me, when my husband travels, I go to the dark space of what if his plane crashes? What if he gets hit by a bus? Whatever? He's our breadwinner. So that I know I even struggle with just numbers in general. I just know that that would be a struggle for me. And then with a tragedy or something on top of that, and top of kids, all the things it's very overwhelming. So I wanted to create a system where anything that I didn't know, or anything that someone would need to know if something were to happen to keep my kids functioning as normal as possible because it's not a normal situation.”
Being a mom is like being the “CEO of your home.” If you remove mom from the situation, even temporarily, what would happen? I know it seems a little silly to think about, but things do happen. So when you create the structure, when you’re consistent, it takes away that fear of “what if?” Your kids, your family, your employees, whatever, will know exactly how things need to be done because they’ve become a habit. “So having a system in place would just help someone navigate it so much easier already in a stressful time. But when and if that were ever to happen, it's in place now.”
Get Over the Guilt of Wanting More
Heather’s biggest recommendation is using the schedule you’ve set up for your day and then making sure you “block off time for your children.” And then you need to set those boundaries with yourself, that time isn’t used for anything other than what it has been designated for (not including emergencies, obviously). You also want to “look at your schedule and be like, how is it gonna make me feel if I take this hour and do this? Am I going to feel really guilty, because kids need their parents. But they also need to understand that life happens when they're not around, life happens when they're at school.”
It’s super important to set those expectations that even when some things change in your kid’s schedule or your spouse’s schedule, your schedule might not be able to completely shift, you still have a job, you have to work. Heather even finds a way to include her kids, to make them feel involved, “create some way of her or helping her in a way or pulling up a chair and saying, would you like to color and do work with me? So they're spending time and they're also seeing you as a mom work hard.”
It’s also important to remember that you’re a person and you were a person before motherhood, entrepreneurship, whatever. “We enjoyed going to the movies, we enjoyed the music that we that we used to listen to. That didn't go away, or maybe it's changed a bit. But that still filled us up. And if we aren't at our best, we cannot be the best for them, the best for our employer” When we aren’t taking care of ourselves, we aren’t able to completely take care of those around us. “You'll maybe get a little short with your children or you'll have some mood swings. So making sure that you are placing some time in there, whether that's five to 10 minutes in the morning of meditation, or I like to take a longer shower. So take a longer shower to have some peace and quiet things that will make you okay through the day.”
Something else Heather strongly encourages is the act of saying “no,” knowing that you “don’t have to say yes to everything.” When you say yes to everything and everyone, you’re setting that expectation and you’re sacrificing your values. Instead, make those values, those non-negotiables, clear from the beginning, “my child is XYZ, if this phone rings and it's them, I will have to pause and take it. I don't want to do business with people that don't recognize my values, I value my family. And if they can't understand that, then they're just not going to be a right fit for me. So it's kind of getting comfortable with that too.”
How do You Know What’s Most Important to Work On?
For Heather, every night right before she goes to bed, looking at her calendar gives her a “good idea of what's going on. And every morning I go through my three top non-negotiables. What are like the three most important things I have to do, whether that be a deadline, a doctor's appointment, something business or home life. And then you do the top three things that you would need to get done after that, but could possibly wait or could get moved around.” You want to go through your list and plan out how much time each thing will take, extra time in case something goes wrong, and how you can best spend your time for the day based off of those non-negotiables.
If you don’t get to all of them, whatever is left goes onto the next day higher in priority, you always want to make sure the things that get put off get done, “because it's just going to keep going and then the guilt is going to happen. And then you're going to be rushed. And then you're going to put something else off. And it's like a just a domino effect. So having a piece of paper every day, top three things and then extra, and you just kind of move them up the ladder, and check them off the box. And I like paper and pen. Because if you're physically crossing it off, you're been mentally taking it off of your list as well. And you're able to be like it's done, release it.”
If you’re a visual person, like Heather, you probably need to have a system in place that limits your distractions from the space around you. For Heather, “this is why my daughter came early because I was unpacking boxes I could not stare at. But if I put them behind a closet, they can stay in a box all the time. But if I'm looking at something that I know I need to do, but I just can't get to it gives me anxiety.” Move those types of triggers out of your visual space so you aren’t constantly thinking about them and stressing over them. Heather describes it as a “mental game. Crossing things off, making sure that you are also intentional like, I'm going to do what I told myself I was going to get it done. But you want to get it done because you also feel a sense of accomplishment when you get it done. I got five of the seven things done to ain't bad. I can move those to tomorrow, instead of it being I just sucked at life today. I couldn't get those last few things done. So it's just kind of changing that mindset up as I got it done, not oh man I didn't get that done.”
What’s most important is that you find that balance between holding yourself accountable while still being forgiving and kind to yourself.
To listen to the full conversation click the links beneath the main photo to listen on your favorite platform!
Affirmation
I embrace my identity as a divine spirit and use this powerful source within to play the roles in my life with excellence.
Links From the Show
Follow Heather on Instagram here.
Listen to Heather’s podcast Chaos ‘N Cookies.
Sign up for our daily emails here.
Follow us on Instagram here.
*This is an affiliate link. Purchasing through affiliate links helps fund The Good Space at no extra cost to you. Thank you for supporting us!
