The Lazy Genius Podcast - #132 - Ten Steps to Creating Your Own Traditions

Episode Date: November 18, 2019

I love the idea of being thoughtful and intentional about anything, and traditions definitely fit the bill. So today, we’re going to walk through ten steps to creating your own so you’ll be able to think about traditions like a Lazy Genius and then maybe actually do them. This conversation is all about creating your own traditions, so no matter what your family unit looks like, this conversation is for you. Helpful Companion Links This week’s topic was inspired by a conversation during last week’s Instagram Live! You can find me there @thelazygenius. I usually host a LIVE Q&A on Thursdays around noon EST (except for this week), and you can re-watch previous Lives on IGTV. The Lazy Genius Black Friday Bundle will be available for a one-day only flash sale beginning Friday, November 29. Hop on my mailing list so you won’t miss out on buying all three Lazy Genius products for one low price.  Download a transcript of this episode. This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi there. You're listening to the Lazy Genius podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today's episode 132, 10 steps to creating your own traditions. Last week during the Instagram live, which you can always take part in by following me at the lazy genius on Instagram and hopping on most Thursdays around noon Eastern time, I shared with you guys that I did not have an episode plan. for today. Thankfully, Mrs. Kay to you had the idea of talking about creating your own family traditions. And several folks seconded that motion and here we are. I love the idea of being thoughtful and intentional about anything and traditions definitely fit the bill. So today we're going to walk through 10 steps to creating your own traditions. I'll share some of our family traditions as examples, but this episode isn't so much a list of ideas. Ideas are plentiful. in other places. These steps are meant to help you think about the why, how, when, and all the things about your own traditions. Because just giving you ideas will only create stress as you try to add

something else to your life, which none of us really need. Instead, you'll be able to think about traditions like a lazy genius and then maybe actually do them. I also want to say up front that this doesn't have to be about family traditions. If you're single, family traditions feel alienating. If your kids have recently moved out. Maybe the idea of family traditions, it makes you sad because your family doesn't look the way it once did. This conversation is all about creating your own traditions. So no matter what your family unit looks like, this conversation is for you. Before we get into the 10 steps, I have very exciting news. I'm often asked, will the SWAT be available again? Will the meal plan be available again? And if it's worth getting the holiday docket now, even though it's

almost September. The answer to all three of those questions is yes. On Black Friday, I am offering all three digital lazy genius products for one sale price in the first ever lazy genius bundle. Basically, I realize that a lot of you are on tight budgets and struggle to spend money on anything that doesn't feel essential. I get that for real. So as a fun way to participate in the spirit of Black Friday, the swap, which is the lazy genius guide to decluttering. for life, the meal plan, which is the lazy genius guide to happy dinners at home, and the holiday docket, the lazy genius guide to celebrating well, are all available for one discounted price on Black Friday, November 29th until 8 a.m. Eastern on Saturday the 30th. I'll be sending out two

reminder emails to the mailing list about this. So if you want to make sure you get the word on that, join that list at the lazy genius collective.com slash join or click the link in the profile. I will, the profile. That's Instagram. Click the link in the show notes. That's where you need to click the link. I will remind you again in next week's episode two, but I just wanted to give you like a heads up now so you can plan in case you're interested. Okay, so let's walk through the 10 steps to creating your own traditions. Step one. Name what matters. Shocker. This is always where you need to start with pretty much anything. If you don't name what matters about your traditions, you're not going to know what to be a genius about and what to be lazy about. For example, a lot of people

have a family tradition of getting Christmas photos taken for Christmas cards. Well, we don't send Christmas cards as a family. It's not something we've ever done. And even though we might one day, we aren't this day. That means that adding the tradition of family photos, which is a great thing, to the busiest time of year, is not a great thing. It is not being a genius about what matters to us. we can plan to capture our growing family other times of the year and be very lazy about that being a holiday tradition right now. One thing for our family that does matter is participating in our city. We love going to things in our town, seeing people we know on the street at a parade, taking part in this place that we love to call our home. Being an active part in the events of our

city matters to us. So we have a, we have several family traditions centered around the things in the city, but we have one that's actually coming up in a couple of weeks. It's the first weekend of every December, our city has something called Winterfest. It begins on Friday night where much of downtown is shut down to leave the streets open for all kinds of holiday stuff. All the shops stay open. Santa comes. There's like a Santa set up. There are different musical acts like carolers and all kinds of things like spread up and down the street, food trucks. The last couple of years, they've had a snow machine in the busiest intersection of downtown. It's amazing. It's just the best fun. We always eat an early dinner at the same downtown restaurant and then walk the streets. As our kids have gotten

older, we've been able to stay longer. We've also invited another family to join us, and it's now become a family tradition for our two families together to go to Winterfest over the last couple of years, which really helps because then like every kid has a buddy and not just mom or dad, you know, to hang out with as the kids get older. That's really important to remember. And then that actually reminds me of something else that matters. Connection. Now that matters to a lot of us. We love having traditions that include other people because doing life with other people matters. So for our family, like we always go trick-or-treating with my sister and her family and my parents. We've done that since the kids were tiny. The root gets longer each time.

But we've always done that. Now, might that change as the kids age and want to trick or treat with their friends? Probably. But for now, it's a family tradition we enjoy because it's prioritizing what matters to us. So step one, and easily the most important step of this whole thing, is name what matters. As you name what matters in your life, you'll be able to name what you'd like to mark and celebrate every single year. Step two, consider what you already do. you likely have traditions you love, but in the kind of haze of like trying to have more or be better at them, you might have forgotten what you already have. So take a second and maybe even write down what traditions you already do. I already mentioned Winterfest, which I didn't even mention the rest of it,

which is a holiday parade that Saturday morning and then something called Candlefest that Saturday night where an entire public park is lined with luminaries. It's so pretty, something we love doing. that weekend, in fact, is our family's opening ceremony to the Christmas season. It's possibly my favorite weekend of the entire year. Other traditions that we already do. We do a corn maze and a hayride, stuff like that every October. We put up our Christmas decorations the Sunday after Thanksgiving. I have business traditions. Not everything's family related. I get together with two different groups of women once a year for a weekend of work and processing and rest with friends who do the same work that I do. We as a family go out for hamburgers on the night before the first day of school.

We watch fireworks with friends every 4th of July. The birthday boy or girl in our house gets to choose what we eat all week the week of their birthday. It's tradition, right? That's a lot of beautiful tradition. When you list out all the things you likely already do, it puts the desire for creating new traditions into perspective. And, you'll just be a lot of things. And, doing what you have will have a lot of impact on choosing what else you want to do. You might not feel the pull to create a bunch of new things anyway. Step three. Consider what you can repeat. Think about things you've done this past year that were really meaningful or fun or both. What is something you did to mark a certain time of your

life or season or maybe just something completely random? Is that something you would like to repeat? traditions are really just a choice to repeat something. So if you've done something, you really loved, consider repeating it. That might be the start of a new tradition. I know that's really simple, but man, do we just forget simple things. Step four, start small. You know that, don't you? We talk about that a lot. If you try and sketch out a bunch of elaborate traditions, especially during this time of year, you will lose your mind. Nothing will happen the way you want it to because big and grand often fall apart unless they're built small step by step. So start small. Maybe creating your own traditions means starting small with what you already do and just enjoying that. Maybe instead of creating a

tradition of like getting new pajamas and then making hot chocolate for the car, driving to see all the Christmas lights on Christmas Eve with like a great holiday playlist in the car and then you come home and watch a movie after. Maybe you just start with the pajamas, or start with the lights, or start with a movie, start small, start with one thing. You have time to build, but often the small things are the most meaningful anyway. It's something else here now, something new. From, exclusively on Paramount Plus, it's the series Stephen King calls Scary as Hell. Everything here is impossible, but it's also real. Sci-fi vision calls it the best show streaming right now.

at a time and we still don't know the rules. Don't miss what the movie blog calls something you need to watch. Saving those children is how we all go home. From binge all episodes exclusively on Paramount Plus. Aw isn't something we need to travel for. It's something waiting

for us in everyday life. Whether in a city street or a moment with a work of art. I'm Dacker Keltner, host of the Science of Happiness podcast. Join me for Cities of Aw. A special series on how our public spaces can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life.

You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Step 5. Make it a group thing. I'm super guilty of not doing this. I'll have an idea for a tradition and then I'll just spring it on everybody, assuming everyone is on board. That is not always the case. Besides, traditions are repeated because people want them to be repeated.

So make sure everyone is on board before you start repeating. something and bring people into the process on what your group wants to do. Very simple. Step six, mark the moment first. Don't get hung up on creating a tradition. Again, traditions are just things we did once that we really liked that we decide on purpose to repeat. So first, just mark the moment. If you mark it and it was memorable or lovely or fun or whatever for the people involved, then you can consider doing it again. That's why step three is really important. Consider what you can repeat.

What have you already done that you can repeat? But here in step six, don't even think about the repeating. Just think about what moment you want to mark. What relationship do you want to mark? What season? What event? Just mark the moment first. Let it breathe.

Step seven. Write down this year's moments on next year's calendar. This is a way to set yourself up with steps three and that we just talked about, if you do something this year, if you mark a moment, go ahead and add it to a digital calendar for the following year. If next year, you come around to that thing and you're like, yeah, let's not, then it's not a tradition. It was a marked moment then and it was lovely, or maybe not, but you don't need to repeat it. But if you come upon a calendar item in a year that you're excited about and if it involves others, like everyone else agrees on that thing,

to, then do it again. You might have a tradition on your hands. Step eight, check your expectations. This is always a good thing to do. When you're in an experience or you're about to start one, check your expectations. We put so much pressure on the idea of traditions. Somehow, if you're not doing them, you're not doing life right. There's something about tradition that implies a life well lived. And maybe to an extent, maybe that's a little true, simply because there's just intention behind marking moments. But if you put a lot of those expectations on the experience itself, the experience will likely disappoint you. If you want everybody to remember this thing, or be smiling huge smiles the entire time, or not be distracted by their phones, or any number

of like secretly small but powerful expectations, you'll be disappointed and maybe even resentful torture people. So check your expectations. Don't put so much pressure on each tradition. Just do the thing. Be a person. Love your people. It's all going to be okay.

Step nine. Embrace your season of life. When you have little kids, certain traditions are crapshoot. Just roll with it, right? If your marriage is struggling and your anniversary rolls around, the tradition of going out to the restaurant where you had your first date, it might feel really difficult. use that as an invitation to be honest and loving towards your spouse about how you're feeling. If you're in a season of bad health or you've recently been diagnosed with something that brings with it chronic pain and the traditional winter break ski trip just isn't in the cards for

you. Grieve the loss and then go take the fattest book you can with you into the lodge. Enjoy the fireplace. You know, you can warmly welcome your people as they come in from the cold. I'm not saying that you should ignore the season you're in and pretend that everything is okay, but seasons are seasons and they change. But where you are right now, it might not line up with the way you want them to, the way that they've been, the way that you hope they will be.

It's easy to let that disappointment affect everything. Instead, embrace your season of life. Consider how you can grieve the loss of whatever the season is, but then embrace the surprises that it might bring. And step 10. remember on purpose having space for regular reflection is such a gift and it will help you name what might become a tradition in your life remember how you felt during a certain event or activity ask your people to remember how they felt ask them to remember something that they've

enjoyed from the past three months you're not trying to do like some cold research project you're remembering on purpose, which actually has enough beauty on its own. But in the process of remembering and reflecting, be open to whatever experiences you might want to repeat next year. Go ahead and do step seven, which is to go ahead and write down the thing next year at that same time. Maybe you do it, maybe you don't when the time rolls around. But by remembering on purpose, you're giving yourself the open door of creating your own tradition if you want to. Okay. So to recap, to recap, are 10 steps. Step one, name what matters. Step two, consider what you already do. Three, consider what you can repeat. Four, start small. Five, make it a group thing. Six, mark the moment first. Seven,

write down this year's moments on next year's calendar. Eight, check your expectations. Nine, embrace your season of life and 10 remember on purpose. I really believe that these steps will give you such a freeing framework to create your own traditions. And if you're feeling overwhelmed by thinking about like an entire year's worth, start just with right now. Today is November 18th. Go through these steps just for like the next six weeks or whatever. You know, start small. Even with using these steps, start small. I'm really excited about this for you guys. And I hope you feel encouraged in the process of creating your own traditions. There is no Instagram live this week if you have questions about this because I have an appointment right before our usual lifetime that might run

over and mostly because my middle son Ben is having a procedure on Friday. He'll be fine. He's getting some stuff removed from his face, but he's not like his nose. He has like a skin condition. but he has to be sedated and all the things. So I'm trying to leave Thursday as empty as I can for my own personal space to prepare for being in the hospital all day with him the next day. I don't do that space well, that hospital thing. I don't know who does really, but like in all of the emergencies that my kids have experienced, my husband is the one who's been in the hard spots. He has like, he's held hands through spinal taps and during stitches. He spent days in the ICU with Ben when Ben was an infant. He had a blood infection when he was a week old. And he was there for most of that.

I just break in half in hospitals. So all of that information to say, I will not be doing alive this week so that I can just like breathe and rest and prepare and be a person to be with Ben. And if you are someone who prays, I will certainly receive your prayers for Ben this week. And I'm very, very grateful for them. All right, friends, that's it for today. I'm so glad you listen and share and all the things, this lazy genius community is such a gift to me, and I hope it is to you too. Until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra, and I'll see you next week. You ever felt like you were living just a B or B plus life? It's so dangerous to live that, more dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life,

because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A-plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves. Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.