3 in 30 Takeaways for Moms

Nine years ago this month, I recorded the very first episode of 3 in 30 in my closet, took a deep breath, and pushed publish. That night I celebrated with my husband and our two little kids, never imagining the people I'd get to learn from or the women I'd get to work alongside in the years ahead. Every October I look back on that day with a little bit of awe and a lot of gratitude, and this year...

The power struggles in our home used to be about car seats and leaving the park. Now they're about phones, sleepovers, and YouTube. But whether you're dealing with little kids you can pick up or teenagers who tower over you, the key to handling power struggles is usually the same. When a power struggle starts, it's so tempting to dig in and prove who's in charge. But I've learned that the tighter...

The first time my therapist asked me to picture "little Rachel" on the playground, glasses and all, and offer her the comfort she needed, I thought it sounded so woo-woo. I went along with it, but I was skeptical that imagining my younger self could change anything about how I feel today. What I didn't know then is that there's real science behind exercises like that one. Our sense of worth is bui...

When I interviewed Shawnee for this episode, I had to chuckle, because one of the things she listed as soul-care was volunteering for her kids' PTO. As an introvert, I think of the PTO as the classic example of something moms finally learn to say no to, so seeing it on her list of things that fill her up was the perfect reminder that there's no single right way to be a good mom.   That's the...

A few weeks ago, I wasn't sure I was going to open enrollment for my Self-Assured Motherhood Program this year. Of all the work I do, SAM is where I feel like I'm making the biggest difference, but I honestly didn't know if I had it in me. My brother-in-law Logan died unexpectedly this summer, at 44 years old, and I spent most of the season at my sister's house doing dishes, walking the dog, and s...

The sign-ups have started coming in. Fall sports, piano, dance, school plays – it's a lot. And while we know we want our kids to be involved in things so they can thrive, too often we're left burned out and... not thriving. It's easy to assume the problem is the number of activities, and that the fix is to cut something. And sometimes it is. But a lot of the time, the schedule isn't actually the t...

Consistency has never come easily to me. I'm a scattered creative, I have ADHD, and I have struggled with routines and habits for pretty much my whole life. For years I assumed that meant something was wrong with me, and I felt like it was my fault that I couldn't stay consistent with anything. But this week's guest, Monica Packer, has changed how I feel about habit-building. Monica hosts the podc...

My instinct, when one of my kids is struggling, is to solve it, save them from it, or to worry about it so intensely that the worrying becomes consuming. These instincts are natural because I love my kids so much, and I hate to see them in pain. But they also don't work, at least not very effectively. Our children need to experience hard things in order to grow, and the most useful thing I can do,...

What you look for, you will find. I have believed that about motherhood for a long time now, long enough that I built a whole journal around the idea, and I have heard from hundreds of mothers who have had the same experience. They weren't finding more good because their children had suddenly changed. They were finding more good because they had started looking for it. That is the whole heart of t...

I have a confession. Of the six principles I teach in Self-Assured Motherhood, soul-care is the one where I'm still not where I want to be. I've taken good care of my mind and my spirit over the years, but when work gets busy, the first things to go are exercise, sleep, and eating well, and I'm starting to feel the cost of that in my body as I get older. I say soul-care rather than self-care on pu...

After years and years of therapy, I have gotten pretty good at setting boundaries with almost everyone in my life. My weakest area, by far, is my own children. I'm a softie, and it is very difficult for me to let my kids be unhappy and not immediately try to resolve it. That instinct comes from something real, because connection with my children is one of my true strengths and I lean into it on pu...

I have spent so much time, energy, and money over the years trying to get good at the things I am simply not good at. Routines are my big one. I am not great at keeping our home organized and running on any kind of rhythm, and there have been whole seasons where I decided that fixing that about myself was the most important work I could possibly be doing. Now, there's nothing wrong with striving t...

It's back-to-school season, and our kids are about to be assessed on their reading, their math, and their writing. But what if we gave ourselves an assessment for how we're doing as moms? (And I don't mean a test involving balancing equations... I would rather not know my score for that. 😬) Instead, we can assess ourselves on our emotional wellbeing, because that affects everything about motherho...

I have never been much of a meditator. Sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor, waiting for my brain to go quiet, has never once worked for me. I'm too in my head, too cerebral, too prone to just thinking harder instead of actually feeling calmer. So when I recorded this episode, I wasn't expecting to walk away from it more relaxed than I've felt in weeks. But that's exactly what happened. This w...

If the back-to-school season is already creeping up on you (the supply lists, the new routines, the mental math of who needs to be where and when), you are not the only mom feeling that low hum of stress. Every year it sneaks up faster than I expect it to, and every year I tell myself this is the year I'll feel ready. And... I never quite do. (Maybe you can relate! 😆) So today I'm handing the mic...

With back-to-school season right around the corner, I keep thinking about a moment from my own high school years – a moment so small I barely registered it at the time. I noticed a kid sitting alone, stuck out my hand, and said hi. That was it. What I didn't know was that it would change his life, and honestly, mine too. This is a re-air of one of my favorite episodes from the archives, originally...

Lately, my kids have been watching a lot of TV. More than I'd like to admit. And for a while, I let myself spiral about it. What kind of mom lets her kids zone out on screens all day? What is that doing to them? But then I caught myself, because I've learned that there's a difference between self-confronting and shame-spiraling. And, once I stopped the shame-spiral, I reminded myself that our fami...

Grief has been close to my family lately, and in the weeks since losing my brother-in-law Logan, I've found myself returning again and again to the memories that hold the people we love, long after they're no longer here. This July 14th marks twenty-three years since my mother passed away from breast cancer. I was nineteen years old. And this episode (one of the most personal I've ever recorded) i...

I have been a writer my whole life. Long before this podcast existed, writing was how I made sense of my hardest seasons, how I figured out what I actually thought and felt, and how I slowly found my way through pain I didn't know how to carry any other way. Some of that writing happened in therapy. And some of the most important pages I ever filled were written during my recovery from an eating d...

I'm a word person. (Occupational hazard of spending years as an English teacher, I suppose.) I notice when words shift — when something that used to feel simple and clear starts carrying extra weight, or gets claimed by one group of people until the rest of us feel uncertain about whether we're still allowed to use it the way we always meant to. That's what's happened, at least in my experience, t...

For years, I had a vision in my head of the kind of mom I was going to be. I would be present and patient. I would have snacks ready after school and summers full of creative activities. When I finally became a mom, I struggled to match the realities of the daily motherhood grind and the ideal images of motherhood I had in my head. This week's guest is Amy Marie Hann, author of Master the Mundane....

I have a friend named Laney who genuinely does not experience mom guilt. Not because she's a perfect mom, but because she's decided her kids are lucky to have her — and she means it! I used to laugh when she said things like that. But, now, after working for years on myself (I've come so far!), I understand that what I was struggling with wasn't only guilt over my shortcomings as a mom, but it was...

I am recording the intro to this episode during one of the saddest weeks of my life. My beloved brother-in-law, Logan McKenna, died unexpectedly last Sunday morning. He was only 44 years old, and we are simply shattered by this loss. As soon as I got the call, I got into my car and started driving to Utah to be with my sister and her two teenage children. And as I was driving, trying to wrap my mi...

I've spent a lot of time thinking about what the word "self-assured" actually means in the context of motherhood. And I think somewhere along the way, a lot of us accidentally absorbed this idea that being self-assured means being self-sufficient — that if we were really emotionally healthy or mature or confident, we would just… handle everything on our own. But what I observed at my SAM Retreat l...

If you've ever worried that you've messed up your relationship with your kids — whether it happened this morning or years ago — this episode is going to bring you a lot of comfort. This week's guest is Wendy Snyder, founder of Fresh Start Family and author of the brand new book Fresh Start Your Family, and she is living proof that it is never too late to start fresh. Wendy shares some of her own b...