Tired, feeling like a failure, not sure what to do but there are a million things you should have done yesterday – I hear it every day from ladies joining Convivial Circle. They are on the brink or past the brink of burnout.
I’ve been there, too. I know what it feels like to be drowning in undone housework. I know what it feels like to be lost, listless, restless, apathetic at home. While a good method for tackling the clutter and cleaning can help, what I needed and what I find other ladies also need first is an attitude correction. The work becomes so much more manageable and lighter when we tackle it with upbeat energy rather than disconsolate plodding.
Addressing Root Causes of Overwhelm
When we feel like we’re drowning, when we are overwhelmed, we often first blame our situation – the difficulties that landed us in more mess than we like, the messes of other people that only get worse and never better. We feel like victims of our environment. So, naturally, we think that if we only change the environment, we will change and revert to our ideal selves.
The Truth About Change
But it actually works the other way around. You get yourself under control – your attitude and your actions – and then you start to see order and cleanliness spread out, slow step by slow step.
Internal vs External Solutions
The disorder in your thoughts, the distraction of your attention, prevent you from pulling things together. Being discontent and restless makes the environment, your situation, worse, never better. The discontent and restlessness in your heart have to be dealt with in your heart, on the inside, not by cleaning up your house.
Happiness First
You think you can’t be happy with your life until AFTER your house is clean and organized, but actually you will finally begin getting traction in your home after you get happy. Your heart, your mindset, your feelings, your attitude – are under your control. You can deal with them directly.
Practical Strategies Happy Homemaking
If you follow homemaking blogs and YouTube channels these days, it’s easy to get the impression that what you need to be a great homemaker is to make sourdough, slowly sweep your house in silence and natural light, and decorate your table with candles you made yourself and flowers you cut from your yard.
Focus on Attitude, Not Just Actions
Good homemaking today doesn’t mean imitating good homemaking centuries ago when housewives HAD to manufacture the family’s food and clothes and goods.
If you’re working on improving your personal habits, you need more than just a time and a list. You need planted seeds and cultivated soil. Let me walk you through that process with Humble Habits.
Small habits are like seeds. Habits that stick are planted seeds that grow, not mature transplants we purchase and try to dig into ourselves full-grown. Those are most likely to scorch and die within the first week.
Overcoming Challenges in Daily Habits
Let me give you an example with prayer.
The plant that we want, laden with fruit, is a time reserved in the morning and evening to pray. But if we try just jumping right into a fully grown prayer habit from nothing, it feels difficult and definitely not sticky. We reserve the time, sit to pray, and can’t keep our mind on target. We need more than the time and the list. We’re missing the seed and the soil cultivation for our plant.
The seed is not the same thing as the plant. Plants do grow from small seedlings into mature plants gradually over time, but that’s not the same thing as the seed.
The seed for a prayer habit is prayerfulness, which is different from merely blocking off time. We need to accustom ourselves to turning our attention to God rather than ourselves and our to-do list and our circumstances.
Personal Strategies for Being Happy
We cultivate prayerfulness in a few ways inside Convivial Circle. First, we create alignment cards. These are Scripture or other prompts that become visible cues and directives how and what to pray. Stuck on our bathroom mirror, we can pray the Scripture while washing our hands. Hanging by the kitchen sink, we are prompted to pray while doing dishes. By these small, 30-second practices of prayer, we grow accustomed to turning our attention to God rather than earthly matters.
The second way we do this is found in the Humble Habits course. We work on changing our very first thought of the day. This is tricky to master, but we have several tactics to try. If our first thought of the day is something as simple and basic as “This is the day the Lord has made; I will rejoice and be glad in it,” then our whole frame of reference for the day is shifted.
Success Through Small, Daily Changes
Usually, our first conscious thoughts are worries, uncertainties, or just jumbled emotions. Intentionally changing our very first thoughts makes it possible to turn to prayer after we’re up and about and in our prayer spot, with our prayer list, and with our prayer time. Our mind and heart are already ordered with a disposition to pray.
Now, if you have a million things on your to-do list and clutter everywhere, you’re probably going to think that you don’t have time and space for these two habits. Putting up Scripture on index cards in strategic locations and using them as a prompt for prayer and giving yourself a visible cue to smile, but these are the kinds of habits that actually expand your time, expand your energy, expand your capacity.
Homemaking Beyond Current Expectations
If you follow homemaking blogs and YouTube channels these days, it’s easy to get the impression that what you need to be a great homemaker is to make sourdough, slowly sweep your house in silence and natural light, and decorate your table with candles you made yourself and flowers you cut from your yard.
Good homemaking today doesn’t mean imitating good homemaking centuries ago when housewives HAD to manufacture the family’s food and clothes and goods.
If you’re working on improving your personal habits, you need more than just a time and a list. You need planted seeds and cultivated soil. Let me walk you through that process with Humble Habits.