Simple on Purpose | Intentional Living and Parenting

Looking for ways to have more fun in motherhood and BE more fun as a mom? I have asked myself this question too.  Inside of our FB Group – Simple on Purpose Community, there comes a great question. The question was in essence, I can DO fun things with my kids, take them to swim, skate,  and stuff, b ut how do I HAVE fun with my kids?  How do I BE fun?  In this episode, I’...

It’s back to school time! Are you ready? I know we have been enjoying the slow pace of summer and will need to put ourselves back on schedule to make back to school run more smoothly.  Over the years we have developed routines that we rely on in our school and workweek. I want to share our three favourites with you as you think about how you want to start out this new school year as a family....

How did your summer go? Anything you wish you that you did more of or less of? Today I have a PROMPT episode for you – where I will prompt you through some helpful questions that I hope will help you live more intentionally.  Specifically, having a summer on PURPOSE. So let’s take a minute to stop and reflect on the ways you want to improve next summer by noting what you learned f...

Procrastination is an avoidant strategy and there are so many layers to it, why we do it, how to redirect it, how to accept it, and so on.  It is also something almost everyone does and something that can cause a lot of shame, especially for moms    What is procrastination? It is putting something off for later.  We all do it, everday. We put off phone calls and chores and erra...

When an actor is typecast, they are locked into being cast for a certain TYPE of character, always a version of the same thing. And as parents, we can typecast our own kids. We give them labels on what they are – difficult, athletic, flighty, dramatic.  We can also give them seemingly positive labels – like smart, pretty, nice – and those can have impacts on them as well.&#1...

I have been researching goals and habits since we started setting them in 2015. You can hear Conor share his take on doing this work as a couple in this episode .  Over the years I have searched to the ends of Pinterest and tried a lot of strategies to create habits for myself. I was doing this work fueled by the notion that I  had to become a morning person now that I was a mom. I was t...

Andrea is a Registered Dietician who is here to talk with me about our relationship to food and teaching our kids a healthy relationship with food I also had a secret motive in asking her on because I had questions about how to handle food with my kids. I know I’m undoing a lot of cultured rules, how I was raised, my own biases, and I want to be mindful about how I teach my kids, especially my dau...

This is a Q+A episode featuring questions from the Simple Squad (the Simple on Purpose Facebook Community). We are talking about feelings, marriage, seasons of life, parenting and family chores. These answers are coming at you from my life coaching point of view. I am a mom of three kids, trained Life Coach, practical minimalist, and I help moms with intentional living.   Questions cover...

Expectation overwhelm is when you have a to-do list that is so long that it overwhelms you. This starts a defeating cycle of hustling, beating ourselves up for not doing ‘enough’, and not really feeling empowered to live a life of purpose.    Feeling productive and the beliefs we have about how we spend our time Coach women a lot on productivity and procrastination They feel...

Do you struggle in your relationship to getting dressed each day? Do you feel guilty for it, or lack confidence in it?  Jaime McLaughlin is a hair and make-up artist who is helping moms take care of themselves without the mom guilt.  In this episode we talk about the internal shifts we can make, the judgments we might have of ourselves and other moms based on what they wear, busting myth...

When we think about being home with the kids for the summer there can be a lot to dread AND be excited about in this season.  I have found my way out of that mental overwhelm is to make a plan on what what I DO want my summer to be.  Over the years of planning our seasons as a family, we have developed an approach that helps us stay flexible, work around the hurdles and show up even on h...

As moms who want to have hobbies and do things they love we get bogged down with notions that we have to monetize our hobby, or that we have to be exceptional at it. We almost use these as measurements to determine if this hobby is ‘worth it’ in the time, energy, and money it could involve.  I want to pitch the Joy of Being Mediocre and how it can unhook the hustle from the hobby...

Do you wish you made time for the things you enjoy? Maybe you aren’t sure what hobbies you would like, or you think you aren’t ‘creative enough’ to have hobbies.  I have encouragement for the mom who feels guilty that she doesn’t enjoy her time, but also feels guilty when she isn’t ‘productive enough’  Siobhan Johnes from the Unlocked Creat...

This is not the house I would have chosen to be my forever home, but over the years I have come to terms with us staying here – but how to reconcile with the dissatisfaction of this home not being exactly what I want.    Acknowledging our home dissatisfaction Recognizing that deep desire to create a space that FEELS like home Addressing the longing we have to change our homes How w...

This is the LIVE recording from a Facebook Live held earlier today in the Simple on Purpose Community group I am answering FAQs and addressing the myths we might have about emotional intelligence and emotion coaching our kids.  I have been emotion coaching my kids for years now and I have noticed such a huge difference in my own relationship to my emotions and how I handle theirs and help the...

Health class may of taught us about anatomy, maybe  our moms taught us about how to manage a period (but if you are like me, you just figured it out on your own reading the pamphlets in confusion and piecing together crumbs from Seventeen magazine). And then we start going through life, having babies, experiencing postpartum, living momlife and we realize that this whole ‘WOMAN’ t...

As we talked a lot about emotional intelligence, I want to move over to the physical side of emotional awareness. So often we just ignore our bodies and treat them as something that slows us down – but I’ve learned through experience, health problems, and researching the SCIENCE that listening to our bodies is vital. It helps us have a better awareness of ways we need to respond, more...

I have had some great questions on how to teach our kids emotional intelligence – and I will answer them in this episode. I will also run through the 5 steps I use (and learned from John Gottman) on how to walk our kids through their emotions and misbehaviours – also called emotion coaching.  This episode follows up on 119, about tolerating the emotions in ourselves and in our kid...

I want to run through the steps of teaching your kids emotional intelligence. And to lay the groundwork for that, let’s take a minute to explore our relationship to uncomfortable emotions. We are conditioned to view certain emotions as acceptable and unacceptable – and this causes us to have a low tolerance for these emotions that show up in ourselves and in our kids.  Emotional i...

There is an emotional experience of motherhood that can feel dark, angry, exhausting, hopeless. Some of us even experience postpartum depression or other hormonal imbalances that impact our emotional experience.  Is joy still available to us in these really tough times? Does joy mean I’m always happy? Does joy mean it comes easy? Can I find joy in things OUTSIDE of motherhood?   &#...

What does it mean to be ‘Emotionally Intelligent’? How can this help you in motherhood and your life? I’m sharing the basics of Emotional Intelligence (aka EQ) and giving you my take on where each Enneagram Type can develop and round out their EQ The basics of emotional intelligence In a nutshell, EQ is being aware of feelings and managing those feelings in yourself and in your r...

This is a bit different of an episode – it is a FUN episode! It is OUR episode – the one where I tell you what is happening behind the scenes and tell you what the reader/listener feedback survey revealed. What I heard from you: Episodes that have helped you Identity Clutter Being a Mom Martyr Who is listening The topics you love to hear about  Yes, we are friends IRL   Why y...

I was a controlling mom. I turned on the NO switch and said no to my kids, to my husband, to myself. But this need to control everything came from one very specific belief I had about myself: that I was not a capable mom (or a capable person, for the most part) We all like the feeling of being in control, but it can lead us to act in ways we don’t like and it cuts us off from developing the...

What it means to be a mom on purpose – and it is not about having happy, obedient kids. It is actually about being a mom on purpose when our kids are NOT happy or obedient, or when life feels hard and we aren’t feeling happy.  Dealing with Automatic Negative Thoughts Coming off a couple of weeks of feeling like I was hitting a wall and spiralling to all the things that are wrong i...

There is a quote ‘don’t just survive in motherhood, thrive in it’ When I first heard this quote I really hated it.  I was home with three kids under four and very aware of how I was NOT thriving and felt like I wasn’t even surviving.  I resented this notion I had to be thriving.  What I thought thriving in motherhood had to look like cute home, always clean h...