family Archives

Cooler temps, changing leaves and pumpkins are all around! With the seasons changing, this is not only the perfect weather for getting outside, enjoying family and pumpkin spice everything, it’s also the best time to sit down and evaluate some of the habits you’ve picked up in your marriage.

People don’t get divorced and say “I know exactly how we got here!” Usually, it’s more like “I don’t know how we ended up here.” I do. Habits. The small day to day habits that started and snowballed.

Habits like picking up your phone in the evenings instead of intentionally connecting. Putting off adult time or date night because you’re too tired or too busy. Putting the kids and their events above your marriage.

The way to fix or prevent this from happening is simple. With the turn of the seasons, sit down one afternoon or date night and have a conversation. Be open and honest with each other.

1. What is your vision?
Post-pandemic, last quarter of 2021, what is the vision for your life, your family, your career? Think big picture here. What do you need to focus more of to really propel forward? Is it more time as a family? Would cutting some of the extras from your budget to become more financially secure help? How about getting a coach to help your marriage and provide a more stable home life? Do you need a community or a different circle of influence? Would a mindset shift be the ticket?

Hear each other out. If you both have different ideas of what would help, can you combine efforts to do both? As this is a big picture vision, it’s important to think broad here. Don’t try to take on too many smaller tasks. You’ll end up overwhelmed and the small tasks won’t be seen through. Small and simple is best here.

2. Boundaries
If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, I’m sure I sound like a broken record with this one. However, a breakdown in a marriage/family happens because of a lack of boundaries. What do you need to say no to? What do you need to set limits on in this season moving forward? When you visualize where you want your marriage and family to go, what isn’t there? Sometimes moving forward means leaving “the old” behind.

3. Roles
As you’re reflecting on the vision and the boundaries, also think about what’s working and what isn’t. What roles do you play each day? What hats do you wear? Are these roles adding to your life or your stress? I often have couples do an exercise called work | rest. Think about all the things you do daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly. Make a list of those according to whether they are work (energy taking) or rest (energy giving) for you. Now compare that list with your spouse. What is on their work list that’s rest for you? Can you take that chore now? What is rest for them that’s work for you? Switch things up as necessary. For example, bedtime routines are work for me but rest for my husband. When possible, that’s a role that he takes on to give me a break. What roles can you add, take away or change to give everyone more energy, stability, and happiness in the home?

I realize this doesn’t sound super sexy but having a conversation around these three topics will certainly lead to more sexy time and give you the energy you’ve been looking for! Running a home and a successful marriage is a lot like running a business. To be successful, hard conversations need to be had, revamping what isn’t working and ramping up what is takes reflection, effort and mindfulness.

As always, if you need help with these topics, I have space available for pop-up sessions and the back to basics program covers a lot of this as well. There are a couple spaces left in that program too! Cheers to your marriage!

Your coach,

Kameran

“How in the name of Christmas does my house look like a hurricane hit when I just cleaned yesterday?”

It’s said that the way you keep your car or your house is a direct reflection of your life. Is your house chaos? Coordinated chaos? Neat and tidy? Boring and dull? Bright and happy?

I’ve mentioned several times before but if you’re new here, my husband is a commercial airline pilot. Sometimes, like this month, he is gone for 4 days, home for 16 hours-5 days and gone again. The “joke” that’s not very ha ha funny is that he blows in, blows up and blows out. Well one day, not too long ago, I was not so secretly tired of walking behind him and our 10 year old picking socks up off the floor, grabbing the sweatshirt off the back of the chair, cleaning up 33 pairs of shoes by the door, etc. etc. I was also reading a book that I talked about a couple weeks ago called Atomic Habits by James Clear.

In the book, he talks about a bachelor that got tired of his apartment always being messy and refers to himself as “lazy”. But the one thing that got this bachelor on track was starting a “ROOM RESET”. When he was finished with the blanket, he’d shut the TV off, refold the blanket and put it back on the couch where it goes. He would literally reset the room before leaving it.

This seemed completely brilliant! I started implementing this in my home immediately. When my husband started having to pick up all of his own things, I began to have more help, more time for what I wanted to do and less to pick up and he started understanding how much work it really takes to keep a home in order without losing your mind. We also implemented two other rules at the same time. A game called “one touch” and a rule called All+ 1. “One touch” means that whatever you touch, you touch once and put it where it goes right away. No more picking up a cup to move it to the counter then later move it to the dishwasher. Nope. Pick up the cup, in the dishwasher it goes. Dishes are in the dishwasher? You just got the responsibility of putting the dishes away, even if you’re 10. I’ll also add that my child doesn’t get an allowance. He helps out because we are a team and he is a part of that team. Everyone pulls their weight. I don’t get paid to cook dinner, he doesn’t get paid vaccum. Team effort. I will give him a little extra for detailing the car, or dusting base boards. All +1 means that when we do the room reset, you pick up all your junk plus one thing that isn’t yours. That way everyone is helping out. It gets done faster and the house stays picked up.

So how does this apply to your life? Well for starters, it’s not too late to do a “reset” on your life. Stop dwelling on the past and move forward from where you are now. Reset where you are and start moving toward where you want to go. Reset your habits to start new ones or change old ones. Reset your relationship to be better. Get help, change behaviors, fix what’s broken, do a reset. Then check in every day. What’s it look like? How’d the reset go that day? What needs to happen to make it even better the next day?

People never get to the end of something and know exactly what went wrong. They look back and think “what happened”? Small, repeated habits and patterns happened. They never got reset and now the breaking point has come. That breaking point may be your sanity, a divorce, a sippy cup of milk that has molded after getting lost under the seat, an extra 50 pounds, a health issue, whatever applies to you.

If you don’t like who you are, what you’ve become, what your house, your car, or your life look like just yell out “RESET” and commit to it.

XOXO,

Kameran

New Season, New Habits

Hit Reset

“How in the name of Christmas does my house look like a hurricane hit when I just cleaned yesterday?”