You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 128.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove Podcast, your calm space for practical help to get your dream business up and running while being authentically you and taking care of your mental health. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. I'm so glad you're here!

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Hi, my strong friends! Well, summer vacation is starting to finish up. Kids are getting ready to go back to school. And for those of us that are working from home, this might be a big sigh of relief.

 

It's so much easier to do our work hours when our kids aren't here. Isn't that true? Really! The amount of interruptions that we get during our workday when our kids are here is substantial and it can completely derail our business progress. We love our kids.

 

That's the whole reason why we're working, right? We're trying to create an income so that we can take care of our families. You know, that I help you use the clarity steps for achieving any of your goals. So that's your business goals.

 

Last week we were talking about sales funnels. We use the clarity steps to uncover any obstacles that get in the way of our sales funnels working. I also work with you with your schedules and uncover any of the obstacles that get in the way of us doing our schedules. Well, our kids tend to show up as an obstacle on both of those.

 

Because we need our schedule to be intact our work hours to be intact so that we can build all of the stuff for our sales funnel, including our products and services, any of the tech that goes along with it, any of our product fulfillment, any of our marketing activities, all of it. We need to be able to actually have time to do that work. Those are our work hours, our schedule.

 

But then the kids come into play and they're like, Hey, I'm bored! Want to go do something or can you play with me? Or I'm hungry. So many different interruptions.

 

Then when school starts, you might not have those same interruptions, but you can get schedule crashes. So schedule crashes are things that are totally out of your control. Like your school calling and saying, Hey, you have to come pick up your kid because they're sick. You have to come pick them up because they're having some behavior problems today. Or if you're like me, Hey, we're not going to be able to do the bus schedule today. You have to come pick up your kid.

 

That was one of my hardest things moving out here to the coast was that the bus schedule was relatively new and they didn't really have a reliable bus at first. And so it was hit or miss as to whether there would be bus service for my kid to get home. So I'd have my schedule all planned out and then the school would let me know, oh no bus schedule today. And they'd give me last-minute notice. Well, when you're a business owner, especially when your client-facing and you have a client call at that time and they've paid you for it. That's a definite schedule crash.

 

You can't have the school calling you, pulling you away from work because their planning didn't work out too well. That's a schedule crash where it's completely outta your control.

 

Parent Guilt

 

Parent guilt has been a huge obstacle, both for me as I've been going through my whole life with all of these kids and trying to work, but also with my clients. I see this all the time. And so we are familiar with the term mom-guilt. We hear that all of the time, but I'm calling it parent guilt because I work with all genders of people and all genders of people are parents. And they all go through this same thing when they have a business, especially when they're working from home.

 

I just want to give a shout out to all of the parents that have felt underrepresented whenever the term mom-guilt was used. So I'm going to coin the new phrase of parent guilt because we all go through this.

 

Parent guilt happens anytime that our kid comes and interrupts us, or anytime that we get a schedule crash, even when they're supposedly with someone else that's taking care of them. This can also happen just as we are quietly doing our own work. The kid might not even be interrupting us. The kid might not even have a schedule crash that happens during our work hours, but as we're quietly doing our work that inner critic is saying, oh, but your kid! You should be doing X, Y, and Z with your kid.

 

How I start to get the feeling that this has happened for my clients is when they show up to their call and we're talking about their homework for the week, all of those different activities that they committed to doing, we have due dates. We checked in beforehand, like the week before, when we're assigning homework, we're coming up with it together and they're thinking, okay, yeah, I think I can do all this. And for many of them they'll actually go and they'll put it into their Google calendar. So they're doing time blocking, which is a fabulous way of taking care of your schedule and checking, do you actually have enough time for all of these tasks, scheduling it in their calendar.

 

And then they show up to the call and they weren't able to complete all of the tasks. So I'll ask them, okay, well, what obstacles got in the way of that? And all of a sudden, there's all of the stuff. All of the stuff with the kids. Sometimes it's with other family members. So it could be family guilt that we're feeling, not just parent guilt.

 

We might have family members that are having medical crises, or we might have family members that are having financial crises or boredom. Or we might have friends that all of a sudden have time that they can spend with us, but only during our work hours.

 

All of that guilt comes up and we sit there doing this tug of four with, should we do our work hours or go do these other things? My clients will often show up with the list of all of the other things that came up during the week, and I'm asking them, well, how many hours did you actually work this week?

 

And it's not for me to be judgemental. It's just for me to find out just back if they've scheduled 40 hours for their standard work week, and they've only worked five hours, and they're coming saying, oh, I just have too many work activities to do when I'm overwhelmed.

 

Well, you scheduled yourself to work 40 hours a week and picked all of the tasks for 40 hours a week. But when you only work five hours a week, because of all of the other stuff, of course, it's going to feel like too much work. Because you have 40 hours worth of work and you only have five hours available.

 

So that's when we start diving in deeper, did they actually put all of the activities on their calendar? And if they didn't put it on their calendar, like that's a whole other episode on time blocking for tasks. But sometimes, clients haven't even really defined what their work hours are.

 

We tried to do that in the beginning, but sometimes they kind of skirt past that part, so we go back and we look, well, what are your actual work hours? And then what are all of the times when an obstacle came up or an urge to go do something else? What were those things?

 

And then finding out what all of those things are. Then we start to understand, well, what really was the obstacle here?

 

And a lot of times it comes down to boundaries. It's boundary work. We may have set the boundary of work hours, but we have a really hard time honoring our own boundaries, and boundaries are set with love. They're not set with anger. 

 

There are a couple of things that we can do with these time boundaries so that we can actually stick to our work hours so we can actually get our work activities done. So that we can get our sales funnels, working all of our tech, working all this stuff so that we're actually making the revenue that we wanted to. So that we can take care of our family.

 

Because we can't actually do all the things with our kids, like buy the food that we want to buy or go out to restaurants or go do the activities that we want to do with them unless we have money.

 

So if we're not actually doing all of our tasks in our business, we are going to have a really hard time generating the revenue that we need in order to do all of the things in our life that make it super fun to be with our kids.

 

I had to deal a lot with this over the last 20-plus years. If you're relatively new to me, you may not realize that I have five kids, and I've been the breadwinner for my whole life, taking care of my whole family with these five kids.

 

So dealing with the parent guilt was real dealing with the hours was very real. Dealing with kid interruptions and schedule crashes. Very real. This is a day-to-day activity for me for over 20 years.

 

I want to share some of the tips that I did throughout the years to help me to be able to manage it because there's a couple different aspects to it.

 

There's the schedule itself and figuring out what schedule actually works. There's also the communicating of that boundary in a loving way that works for everybody. And then there's the mindset work, right? Because guilt comes up, even if we don't have all of those interruptions. We need to do some of the mindset work so that we're not just sitting in guilt soup all the time.

 

Tip 1: Establishing Your Work Hours

 

The very first one is picking times that actually work for you. So when you're your own boss, as an entrepreneur, you have full schedule flexibility. You can pick any time of the day that you want to work. Now, those of us that came from a corporate setting, we're used to working Monday through Friday, maybe eight to five, and that might work for us. We're already in that routine.

 

If you've had some other type of job and you're used to other hours, then maybe start with that.

 

I have a teacher client who is becoming an entrepreneur, and she's used to having summers off. Okay, well, that's something that we could work with, too. It's possible to create a business that's only nine months out of the year and you get three months off for summer. But deciding that ahead of time is going to be key.

 

And when I started my very first business, when my sons were both toddlers, they were aged one and two. I didn't have a huge surplus of money, so I didn't have the money really to send them off to daycare if I wasn't going to be working for an employer. So I had to get really creative with my work hours, and I wanted to be there with them during the day. And I recognize that toddlers are going to interrupt constantly. Like that's just kind of the nature of toddlers.

 

As much as I'd prefer to just work during the day, because that's what I was used to for well over a decade at that point, it wasn't a good logistical choice with toddlers. So I actually had my work hours set from 9:00 PM until 2:00 AM. I'd get the kids to sleep by like eight o'clock I'd have about an hour to just rest, and relax. And then I would go to work.

 

That might not be the ideal schedule for you. You might not be a night owl. I happen to be a night owl, so it actually worked pretty well for me; but sometimes we have to pick work hours that are not the most ideal, but it has that really big payoff because I was able to spend the whole daytime with my kids, with my toddlers, doing all of the fun stuff and I could still make income at night.

 

Now I know you're probably saying, but wait a minute, what customers could I get in the middle of the night? Well, it all depends on what type of work you're doing.

 

My very first business was called PIP squeaks closet. I was selling new and used baby clothes. So most of my time was spent doing laundry, cleaning up clothes, getting rid of stains, ironing clothes, taking really good photographs, editing backgrounds out of photographs and then posting it up to eBay.

 

I started off with eBay and then eventually made enough money, enough profit from that that I could pay to have somebody create a website for me. And then my website was on par with Gymboree clothing. So I was almost like competing with them, but my prices were a lot better.

 

I had really good clothes too, like name-brand clothes. It's just, I happened to get it at like garage sales for 25 cents because it had a stain, but I was really good at getting the stains out. And then I could turn around and sell it for like 20 bucks because out in the store they'd want $40 for it because it was high name brand stuff. My profit margin was insane.

 

Now most of you are going to be coaches, healers or educators. And we have so many different ways that we can work with our clients. And we have access to our clients all over the world. We have all of those time zones that we can leverage to our benefit.

 

My very first year of business, there were times that I would work at midnight because I had clients that were in other countries. And it worked out really well for them; it was right in the middle of their work day. They loved those hours and I was working at midnight.

 

Now at the time I thought, Hey, this is great. Well, my husband didn't really think it was great. And especially at the time, since all of my clients were men. So he was, a little uncomfortable with me coaching men at midnight.

 

Now, of course, I'm a professional. So all of it was on the up and up. But I factored in that I have to consider my kids' needs. I have to consider my needs, but also, if I have a spouse, I have to consider my spouse's request to.

 

I actually shifted my hours so that I didn't take calls later than 8:00 PM at night. And now my calls are actually Tuesday through Thursday, no later than six o'clock. So it works out really, really well for everybody.

 

But the point being that we have all of these time zones that we can use to work in our favor.

 

I am a client in another program that offers 20 minute coaching sessions. They have a lot of different coaches on staff. And then you go in, you look to see what the available times are and you just pick something that works for your schedule. Well, a few years ago they didn't have a whole lot of availability of coaches. And I remember going on there and seeing all of these times that were two o'clock in the morning, three o'clock in the morning and so on.

 

And I thought, I don't want to get up at two o'clock in the morning, my time for a 20-minute coaching call on my personal growth stuff. So I ended up picking an 8:00 AM appointment because that's what was available. And it was the closest that could work for me.

 

But I asked her, why were these calls showing up at two o'clock in the morning, and three o'clock in the morning?

 

And she said, well, because I live in Italy and she said, it works out really well because across the world, there's people that need these calls at different times of the day. So she's in Italy and her work hours might be Monday through Friday, her ideal hours and it works perfectly for somebody else.

 

You also have the flexibility of the type of work that you're doing. Not all of your work is going to be face-to-face with somebody else. If you're someone that's creating an online course, you might want to find little brackets of time that work for you, where you're uninterrupted and that's your recording time.

 

Now, being someone that's now created seven full courses. I know very well how to slice and dice all of these courses. And there's so much work that goes on before you turn on the camera and there's so much work that happens after you're done recording that the time between you and your camera, that's really the only time that it needs to be completely uninterrupted.

 

But you still have all of your time flexibility. You can do that at any time as long as your lighting is good. So you can experiment with the different hours, the different type of work that you're doing.

 

You may have a preference to work as a solid block. Maybe you want to do eight or 10 hours solid block. Maybe you're someone that just wants four hours solid block. If for some reason you start seeing those schedule crashes happening a lot. And there's a pattern to it. The same days, the same times you can block off those times that are out of your control as non-work hours.

 

For example, when my kids' school was having that bus scheduling issue, it always happened at the same time, like when school got out. So I went into my calendar, and I blocked out those hours so that I could accommodate any unpredictable with their school process.

 

I also included the drive time so that I made sure that I made enough of a block so that I was working and then I would stop. I'd have an hour long so that I could go get her, bring her back. And if for some reason the bus actually worked that day. Then I have an hour back to my work schedule. Instead of having a crash, I have a benefit of extra hours added back.

 

So if you're looking at your Google calendar, or maybe you have a journal that has a calendar laid out for you with the different hours, what really are the time blocks that you would want to create for your regular weekly schedule?

 

You can be totally creative. What works for you and your family. You want to pick those hours that have the least chance of interruptions or schedule crashes.

 

Tip 2: Honoring Time Boundaries

 

The next part is actually honoring those time boundaries.

 

As much planning as we do, we try to pick the best hours that work for everybody. The kids are still going to come interrupt. We love these little people, but they do. They come and interrupt, and we start to feel parent guilt. Like we need to respond.

 

So they might come and make a request for us to spend time with them. They might say, Hey, I'm bored or I'm hungry. What are ways that you can quickly communicate your boundary and still help your kid get their needs met?

 

First part of this is include in your schedule in your Google calendar time blocked out specifically to spend with them. Decide ahead of time that you're going to spend so much time with them and which days so that the communication is a lot easier.

 

So when they come to you and they're like, can you spend some time with me? Okay. They probably don't say it that way. It's probably more like I'm bored, but then you can easily communicate your boundaries saying, oh, I love you so much. I can't wait to spend time with you. I have time scheduled at six o'clock to come and spend like two hours with you.

 

That way they know that they're still love. They know that you want to spend time with them. You feel good. You've set time aside for them.

 

The first part of this is time blocking. You've time blocked out when you're work hours will be, but have you time blocked all of the hours that you're going to a hundred percent dedicate to your kids. If you haven't considered doing this, this can really help you out block a certain amount of time every day or specific days on your calendar, where you're deciding ahead of time, you are a hundred percent dedicated to all of your attention on them.

 

So when they come up, I'm bored. Can you do something with me? You can easily respond. I can't wait to spend time with you. In fact, I blocked off some time for us between six and eight o'clock tonight. And I can't wait, but I have to finish up my work so that I can be ready to come and spend time with you.

 

Now, of course the kid might still have some resistance to that answer. They'll be excited that they have time with you from six to eight, but they might want your time right now. So that's where you get to act as a coach for your kid, develop their growth mindset of how they can problem solve for themselves.

 

If they're showing up because they're bored asking them, well, what are all of the things that you can do so that you're not bored?

 

Now of course, they're going to look at you blankly at first and say, I don't know. And they might have a little meltdown because kids do that. Even teenagers do that. And it's okay to send them off with that question and let them be bored. If they're bored long enough, it'll be enough discomfort. They'll figure it out. And they'll have that question going in their head that you ask them, okay, well what can you do while you're bored?

 

Now, they may end up going your whole work day, still being bored and not doing anything and not knowing the answer. That doesn't mean that you have to stop your work and go do something and entertain them. You can help them brainstorm even more during that time block that you set aside for them, but you have to honor your own time block so that you can actually get your work done.

 

I saw some really cool evidence this summer that supports how important this is.

 

My stepdaughter came and stayed with us for about a month. My stepdaughter is a very lucky girl. When she's back at her mom's house, she has her grandma in her life and is very, very active with her. So when my stepdaughter's mom is working full-time and my stepdaughter is not in school, all of her time is spent with her grandma.

 

A very active 76-year-old woman, very positive, always loving to do activities. So my stepdaughter is constantly interacting with an adult, having them do hands-on activities, always doing something. Then she comes to my house during the summer for a whole month. My husband and I both work full time.

 

You know, parent guilt kicks in for both of us and we're aware of how much she has interaction with other adults. She rarely has time on her own. She's always used to having an adult interacting with her. Well, she's 12 at this point. So this has been going on for a couple of years where she comes out here for summer and the guilt always kicks in and she's always asking, do you have to work? Are you off work now? Any time that I come outta my office, are you off work now? Can you do something with me?

 

And it's been hard, but I just communicate of the time that I have available to come and spend with her, because I do. I want to spend time with her. And my husband wants to spend time with her. But here's the thing is that she also had access to my daughter who was home and they're the same age. And my son was also home from college this summer.

 

So the three of them were here and you would think that they would interact with each other. The first week they didn't because my kids are so used to entertaining themselves and doing things that they were already kind of doing their own thing.

 

And then my stepdaughter, she's not used to interacting with other kids. She even told me this after like the first or second day, because I asked, why aren't you doing things with your siblings? And she said, well, I interact better with adult. And I thought uh-oh, this could be a problem. This is a life skill to be able to interact with other people of all ages, not just adults that are going to lead activities.

 

It's also a life skill to be able to entertain yourself. So over the years I had to develop the ability of my kids to do thing.

 

And I wasn't always there during the time that they wanted to do it because I was working. I was the main breadwinner of the family, so I always had to work. I didn't really have that choice.

 

During the time that was dedicated for family time, I'm developing their skills. And one of the things that the kids like to do was baking. I taught them from an early age, how to bake things, cookies, cakes, muffins, bread, everything.

 

Now, I was a little concerned about this safety of them baking things in the oven or, or cooking things on the stovetop. So I had to develop them and their safety skills around that and then sit back and watch and let them do it on their own several times as I waited to see, are they going to get burnt? Is this going to be an issue? And it was a little frightening, but they never got hurt.

 

They proved to me over and over and over that they could do this with safety.

 

So one of the things that my kids do while I'm working is they'll bake. So a couple weeks into my stepdaughter being here, they all got bored enough that they decided, Hey, we're going to start baking.

 

I was able to keep doing my regular work hours and they were quietly baking together, all of them. And so it served double duty. Not only are they creating food, but they're also entertaining themselves and it was a great win across the board.

 

Tip 3: Avoid Task-Switching

 

So that leads into the next thing that the kids will interrupt for, which is I'm hungry. Okay. Even when all of the kids were really little, sometimes I would work from home even with my corporate job and they would constantly come up, oh, I'm hungry, I'm hungry.

 

And I'm like, I'm right in the middle of something. I need to get this work done.

 

Now, if I constantly allowed myself to be interrupted it's task switching, every time I go to help them, my brain is now having to stop the work stuff and think about all of the foodstuff and ingredients and trying to do things. And who's a picky eater and you know, all of the things.

 

And then when I went back to go work on the work stuff, it's like, okay, where was I? And it takes several minutes for my brain to get back into the work thing and to think about all of the pieces and how it's connected. And then I can actually keep working.

 

Whereas if I kept working uninterrupted, I don't have that extra mental bandwidth time needed. I could just keep going. I just have to orient myself in the morning. I'm ready to go. And then I just go.

 

So I had to problem solve. The kids were going to need to eat something throughout the day. How could I make this as easy as possible for them to self-serve all of their food?

 

During my non-work hours, I would devote some time thinking about it and even asking them questions. And so around the dinner table, I would present the problem to them and say, okay, here's the thing. You need to be able to feed yourself while I'm working. What are some things that you can think of that you would eat that are healthy? Because you know, they're going to want to go right to the sugary snacks and stuff. What are things that are healthy that you could eat on your own and you don't need my help.

 

And so I'd let them brainstorm. So again, I'm developing their growth mindset at problem-solving.

 

And then they come up with all of these ideas and some of the things I never even thought of on my own. And then when we'd go grocery shopping, I would get those things. And then when they wanted to eat something, they already had things that were super easy for them to go grab.

 

And so we're talking all age ranges because had the kids, since they were infants all the way up into their twenties. So sometimes they just want apple sauce and sometimes apple sauce with food coloring. They'd like to make purple or blue apple sauce. It was fun for them. It gave them the creativity and apple sauce was really easy for them to get on their own. It could be a little cups of apple sauce. It could be a jar and then they pour it into a bowl.

 

So they come up with that string cheese was one of 'em hard-boiled eggs at one point. Little fruit cups, granola bars. Sandwiches.

 

And then as they started to get older, their pallet changed to then wanting cans of soup that they could just open up in microwave. Or some of those pre-made salads. My daughter loves the pre-made chef salads that they sell at Safeway. She'll get a whole bunch of those. So she's eating healthy, but it's also really fast.

 

And then as they get a little bit older and I'm trying to teach them about money too, again, non-work time and we're talking about that and problem solving and I'm saying, well, what would be more cost-effective? To buy a can of soup or to make a whole pot of soup that can last all week.

 

So we did a little experiment of going and buying the ingredients, looking at the price of all of the ingredients I taught my 12-year-old, how to make a big pot of soup and then measuring it out to see, well, how many bowls of soup does this make? Because we're looking at the equivalent with the cans of soup.

 

And then later on calculating it all up to see if we have the same equivalent of cans of soup, how much would that have cost and then making the soup, how much would that have cost? And then also doing a taste comparison. And it was great!

 

And so now while I'm working my 12-year-old sometimes will start making a big pot of soup, a quiet activity. She's already proven that using the stove is safe. She doesn't get hurt by it and now there's food. And sometimes that soup became dinner for the whole family. And that really helps out because everybody in the family can contribute to the family going.

 

So it just comes down to when they're interrupting you, finding out what is the thing, what's that problem statement that they have, and then helping them to problem-solve so that they come up with their own solution.

 

And eventually you've resolved all of those obstacles that are getting in the way of them leaving you alone while you're working, you all have perfect solutions that work for everything. And now you are able to do your work hours and they're able to do their own thing.

 

Tip 4: Finding The Right Childcare for You

 

Now, that might seem like, well, wait a minute, I have little, little kids. So what then? Well, I had little, little kids at one point too, and I couldn't always afford for the full daycare cost. Sometimes I just go for part-time or drop in for a couple of hours and I had to start when they were little. And I didn't know anybody because I also hear that obstacle of, well, I don't know anybody. I don't have any family in the area.

 

Well, I didn't have family that would watch my kids either. And it was tough. I saw other families that had family members that watched kids, and I was pretty jealous. It's like, I'd really appreciate having family members to help me out, but that wasn't the case for me. I always had to pay for childcare help.

 

And I didn't have anybody supplementing my income, helping me to pay for that childcare, which also was unfortunate. But I had a little bit of a pride issue. I wanted to make sure I could do it on my own, but there are all sorts of different childcare providers out there. You just have to go and experiment with different ones and build up your trust around it. So, if you need to go and interview six to eight different people go and interview six to eight different people during your non-work hours, of course.

 

But find the ones and maybe even do a trial run of like, okay, half an hour with this person, and we'll see what happens.

 

And oh my gosh, my kids had so much separation anxiety, all of the crying, and oh, so the parent guilt definitely came up in me, but I also had to like work through my mindset on that. We're going to get to mindset in a second. But what I found is that yeah, every time there was a new daycare, the first couple of days there were crying in the first, you know, few minutes or so, but the provider would always text me later on to let me know that, oh yeah. As soon as you left, like within two minutes, they stopped crying.

 

That really helped with the guilt because I of course went to worst-case scenario that they're there and they're crying the whole time and they're missing me and all of the drama. Okay. None of that actually happened. That was just the story I created in my head.

 

What actually happened is that they had a really, really good time. My little kids were there with very competent, trustworthy adults that had planned activities and they were doing all sorts of things. They were having fun. They were learning things. And oftentimes there were other kids there. Now they're also learning social skills and they're making friends and there were times where I get there and they didn't want to come home. They wanted to stay because they were having such a good time.

 

Again, you can get really, really creative. You can choose to do that full-time or you can choose to just do an hour here an hour there.

 

If you're someone that is taking client-facing time and you're like, oh, but I can't afford it. Make sure that the prices that you're charging in your business more than compensate for how much it costs for you to have daycare costs.

 

Quick example. When I did decide to go to a regular job after I closed down Pipqueaks closet and I had the toddlers, I found out it was going to cost me $1,700 a month to have my two sons in daycare. When I was getting job offers, some of them looked really, really good. But when I calculated out, how much would I be making after I paid the childcare expenses came out to a dollar an hour.

 

Well, that wasn't worth it.

 

I had to hold out and find a job that paid me more than enough so that I was paying for childcare. And what was left over was plenty to take care of my family. So, you can do that in your business too. Set your prices high enough so that it's actually livable for you, because you want to have a sustainable business, right?

 

When you have no other choice, but to financially provide for your family, you get pretty motivated and you get really creative for how you can problem solve through anything because you don't have a choice. It takes money to support yourself and to support a family in this world.

 

Tip 5: Discover Your Non-Financial Why

 

Now, if you happen to be someone that does have a choice, maybe you have another parent or a spouse or partner that's there that's financially providing for your family. Or maybe you have a sum of money that came into your life that you're able to use to support your family. And it becomes a choice for you to work or to not work.

 

That tug-o-war is going to be really strong for you when the kids want your attention. So you're going to have to really lock onto your why; why do you want to do this? Why is this important?

 

Because if you don't have that why, it's going to be so easy to just cave in to spend time with the kids because let's face it. They're cute. And they're cute for a reason. It's so that you will do all this stuff with them.

 

So what is your why behind your business, and how is that strong enough? And maybe that's part of what you convey to them when they do come in, and you're trying to set your boundary, and you're staying consistent, and that's going to be really key.

 

Your kids will eventually learn to respect your work boundaries with lots of love because you've communicated that boundary, and you've been consistent every single time. If you are kinda wishy-washy with it, and sometimes you have the boundary, and sometimes you don't, it's going to be very confusing. They're not going to know which answer they're going to come up against.

 

They're going to come and try to find out every single time. But if it's consistent that Nope, my work hours are this. My work hours are this, my work hours are this eventually they're going to be like, oh, their work hours are this. I'm not going to go and ask them this right now. I'll ask them then at six o'clock because I know that six o'clock is when they're available for me. Okay?

 

Tip 6: Bring in the Big Tool

 

So the final part is on mindset. You can be sitting there working by yourself. Nobody's interrupting. There's no schedule crashes, but your brain decides to deliver you a whole bunch of guilt soup.

 

And that's not fun. Guilt soup does not taste good. It doesn't feel good to sit in guilt soup. And it's just your mind. It's the thoughts that you're having that are creating those feelings of guilt. So we use the mindset model a lot.

 

So mindset model is where you have a circumstance. It's just a noun that's happening. A noun an a verb happening in your life. And then you have a thought like you see the circumstance, your brain creates the thought. And then the thought creates the feeling. And from our feelings, we have our actions and our actions always give us our results.

 

When guilt soup shows up, guilt goes in that feeling line. Circumstance; we're just working at that moment. You can get really specific about the exact task you were doing at the time, but our brain doesn't really seem to care that much. It's just, if we're working and it wants to give up a thought about you should be spending time with your kids.

 

Oh, your kids need this.

Oh, school's coming up. I need school supplies.

Oh, I gotta think about dinner.

Oh, I didn't think about dinner.

Oh, my kid is bored.

Oh, I want my kid to have friends.

 

Your brain just wants to deliver all sorts of thoughts to you about your kids while you're working. And it starts to create that guilt because you also have the thought, I can't help my kids. I need to work. And so the guilt gets triggered, and then your actions tend to be slowed down work performance.

 

Or you may even get up and leave your work altogether and go do stuff with your kids. And they might not have even been asking for your attention, but your brain has kicked up these thoughts that created guilt. And then your actions are to go and take care of it. because you're trying to get rid of the guilt. And then you end up with these results where you are not getting your work done.

 

And maybe even the actions that you're doing with your kids are unwanted by the kids.

 

It's also possible that you might have an unintentional mindset model where the kid does come in and they interrupt you. And you have this thought that pops up of. They're going to think that I don't love them. So that causes some feelings of guilt.

 

And because we're trying to escape those feelings of guilt, we might get up and we go do the thing with the kid.

 

But what happens is that as we're doing the thing with the kid, we're not a hundred percent present with them. Our brain is still thinking about all of the work activity. We start feeling guilt about not doing the work activity. And so that interaction that we're having with our kid is not that great. And we may end up having to work overtime later on so that we can compensate for the work we didn't do during the day when we were supposed to.

 

That say six to eight-hour block that you had set aside for your kid. You don't get to do that now. So end-result of that is that you actually don't have time for the kid, and maybe you're not showing up a hundred percent in love with the kid, right?

 

Because we had that original thought. They're going to think I don't love them. And I don't have time. I gotta work. So now you've created the result that you actually don't have time because you have to go make up your work. And when you're spending that time with them, you're not in a hundred percent loving feelings.

 

You're feeling guilt about work. You might even start to feel resentment towards the kid for interrupting you and taking you away from work. And that now it's going to be so much harder because you're going to have to work over time.

 

Okay? So when we can see that when we map it all out with these mindset models, we can see that these thoughts are creating our reality, and our reality isn't as good as what we thought it was.

 

We might be spending time with the kid, but it's not the right quality of time. It might be causing overtime or it might be derailing our business and not being able to financially provide for them.

That's where we switch over to an intentional mindset model. So the circumstance is still there. We're either working or a kid has come and requested time from us.

 

We get to decide ahead of time what kind of feeling we want. Now, we could start anywhere on that unintentional model. We could start at the result and work our way up. Like what action would we want? What feeling would we have to feel to do those actions? What thought would we have to have in order to feel that way?

 

But I actually like to start with just the feeling line because we don't want to feel guilt soup. We already know what that comes out to be. So what feeling do you actually want to have when you're working? What feeling do you actually want to have that would lead to actions of you continuing to work and getting results that you actually want? What thought?

 

And it could be a thought I'm just going to offer a thought is I'm role modeling to my kid what it looks like to work from home and create a great income. That feels pretty good. I would stay working there because it's still showing that I love my kid it's role modeling. It's going to develop them over time. And I get my work done. A pretty great thought.

 

When the circumstances that they came and they interrupted you, if you don't want to feel guilt, what's a different feeling that you would want to feel?

 

So one suggestion could be love. I love to feel love. So if a kid comes and interrupts me and I decide, I want to feel love. What thought would I need to have in order to feel that much love? And I don't mean like a little bit of love. Like a lot of love.

 

I came up with a thought of, of course they're interrupting me. They love me. And oh man, I love this kid. I can't wait to spend time with them. Wow. That, that felt pretty good. There was no guilt in any of that. Of course they're interrupting me because they love me and I love them. I can't wait to spend time with them.

 

So when I feel that kind of love from a genuine strong source, then I do the communication of letting them know how much I love them. And the time that I've set aside for them and that I can't wait.

 

I might even ask them, oh, what are some great ideas that you can think of for what we can do during that time? And then send them off. And they're coming up with all sorts of ideas. I hurry up and I do my work. I might even finish early and then I get to go and spend that quality time with them. And I don't have any guilt feelings about work, any resentment or anything. because I finished all the stuff I was supposed to do. And then I get to spend a hundred percent love, super strong quality, love time with them.

 

And they enjoy it, and I enjoy it. And so my thoughts create my reality.

 

So how could you do some mindset coaching for yourself? Think about what the circumstance is that happens and be very specific. What's the noun, what's the verb. You don't want to get caught up in all of the story around it. It's just who was it? And what did they say? Or if it was you, what were you doing at that exact moment? What feeling?

 

Now, in the model a thought happens directly from that circumstance. Oftentimes we're not totally aware of our thoughts. So we go straight to the feeling. What feeling did you feel from that circumstance? And then work your way back up? What thought was I having?

 

And then once you can write out what your thought was and then you have your feeling already, what actions did you take from that feeling, and how did those actions help you to get a result?

 

Now, if you don't like what's in that first unintentional model and it's called unintentional because we didn't plan it. It just automatically happened on default. Then we get to choose what feeling we actually want to have when that circumstance happens because it's going to happen over and over again.

 

So you might as well pick a different thought that works better. What feeling do you actually want to have? What thought would you have to think in order to have that feeling?

 

When you do that, then you'll see what actions flow out of that feeling and what result and it's most likely going to be the result that you actually want.

 

All right. My friends, I hope that that helped!

 

Parent guilt is real. It happens all the time. It's something that you can whittle away. It's not something that turns off overnight. You have to find out what all of those obstacles are and then start resolving them. But there are answers.

 

There are ways that you can resolve all of it or at least a good chunk of it so that you can work during the hours that you set that are workable hours for you. You've experimented with it so that you can actually make your business work and create the revenue that you need so that you can not only support yourself and your family, but you can even have extra to go and do all of the fun stuff.

 

If this is something that you're encountering and you need some extra help on that, I'm here for you. I have a couple of one-on-one spots available. Feel free to reach out to me for a free consultation. If you are an employee and you're having all sorts of parent guilt, then know that you can sign up for life coaching with me, it's a little bit more affordable package and it's just one hour a week.

 

If you are creating your own business, then you definitely want a business journey because not only would we do the life coaching on all of the parent guilt, but we'd also work on all of your business pieces to make sure everything is up and running smoothly and profitably.

 

To schedule time with me, just go over to my website at MyFreedomGrove.com, go to the contact me page. You'll have my schedule right there. You can pick a date and time that works for you. And then we can get together and talk about all the good stuff.

 

Alright, my friends. I hope that you have a great week and I'll talk with you soon. Bye-bye!

 

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