The Lazy Genius Podcast - #62: The Lazy Genius Summer Strategy: Mindset

Episode Date: May 7, 2018

Even now in May, summer already feels overwhelming. We want to get a lot done, rest, have time alone and away from our kids, and figure out the perfect balance between structure and freedom. While that balance might not actually exist, a new mindset can certainly help you try. In this, the first episode in a four-part series, we're going to develop a strategy for the summer, and as always around here, we begin with a little reframing. Listen in. Stuff Mentioned In This Episode: Emily P. Freeman, author of four books, including Simply Tuesday that is a lovely reminder of the beauty of smallness John Freeman, husband to Emily and non-profit director who ran that parenting workshop I mentioned the episode about opening and closing ceremonies around holiday time... the concepts work for summer, too follow me on Instagram @thelazygenius to meet me live every Thursday around 12:15pm EST download a transcript of the episode if you prefer reading to listening 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

Hey everybody. This is the lazy genius podcast. I'm Kendra and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. It's the first Monday in May and we can already feel the heat of the summer, at least the heat from like the pressure of summer schedules and to-do lists and projects and fear of our children like literally coming to blows day after day. So for the entire month of May, we're going to lazy genius our summer.

The hope is that by the day. end of the series, you will have a grounding perspective that carries through the entire summer, a few tangible tips that save you time and energy, and some ideas on how to balance structure and freedom during the summer months. Now, let me say that this series is not just for moms of little kids or even moms in general. I am a mom of little kids. I have two boys in elementary school who are not usually at home during the day, and then a two-year-old daughter who is home with me all the time. So a lot of my perspective is rooted in my own experience. as a mom with younger kids, but this series will offer help for folks in lots of different

situations. So not every word will be for everyone, but if you're a regular listener of the podcast and already resonate with a lot of lazy genius ideas, you'll find something in these episodes to make your summer better. A lot of it is framed within having kids, but a lot of it also works for everybody. So that said, in this first episode, we're going to talk about perspective. We're going to create a mindset, as we love to do around here. But first, we need to acknowledge the mindset that we are currently working with. Okay, so like I said, May just started. And somebody on Instagram, Leslie Rich, she said it best.

She called May December 2.0, which is totally true. A lot of you are teachers, and May is bonkers. And if you have kids, there are plays and recitals and award ceremonies and class parties and all the things. So you're gearing up right as you're entering a season where you're supposed to gear down. But the energy of that gearing up, it still runs underneath the surface. Plus you're tired from like all the going and the planning and forgetting permission slips and paper plates for the party. And you forgot to make a hotel reservation for a vacation, all that stuff. I think that if we were to look, if we were to look underneath May like you look under our couch cushion, we would find so many missing things.

lots gets dropped and forgotten. And it's really easy to leave May with a sense of exhaustion and feeling like you're not enough. Nobody makes it through December 2.0 without a few casualties. So that's our starting energy in the summer, which is really tough. And then it's suddenly the beginning of summer. And you think, okay, how do I do this right? Like, how am I going to have structure for myself and free time that I rarely have? or how do I create structure for my kids who usually get it from school.

But it's the summer and I don't want to be a drill sergeant and only be structured because summer is fun, spontaneous and free. And how do I balance, structure, and free? All the things. Okay, so you might start really intensely on one side. You know, your pendulum is going to swing, like, foo, hard to one side. Probably on the opposite side you usually lean towards. I think we kind of overcorrect in this way.

So if you're usually, like, really structured, you might start the summer, like, all this freedom, but then a lot of guilt sets in because you haven't done anything or because your kids are like now destroying everything, including each other, because there's not any routine to the day. And then remember, you're still in recovery mode from December 2.0. So when things start going crazy, you swing the other way. You create sticker charts until your fingers bleed. You set up a rigorous schedule for yourself, like gym visits and park outings and play dates, plan six weeks in advance, or you're on the other side and you start out, um, like really organized and you like hit your garage gangbusters and you're going to

organize that thing and then you fizzle out so fast and you just want to burn it down because you haven't rested yet and you don't like all of that, all of that structure. We swing far. We swing hard and then we swing far. And then I don't have to tell you that the guilt is really thick after those swings, right? we aren't doing enough. We're doing too much. We're forcing memories. We're not making enough memories.

This cycle is really cruel. There's just too much pressure. So here's where we're going to park for the next few minutes. I'm just going to give you a little pep talk today. The summer is not putting too much pressure on you. We all do it. We are just putting too much pressure on the summer. Even if you're already in survival mode right now in May,

and you can't imagine how you're going to make it through 10 weeks of all the kids being home and asking what's for dinner before they eat breakfast and asking, like, what are we going to do today? Where are we going to go today? Over and over again. It's really important to keep the right things in perspective. Right now, we feel overwhelmed because we're looking at the worst scenario of any day and compounding it across 80 days, right? We want to look at the summer as a long game, but we also need to stay right where we are. We're putting too much pressure on the entire summer all at once. You might be familiar with one of my favorite humans on the whole planet.

Emily P. Freeman, who is a writer and she has a podcast, The Next Right Thing podcast, which you should super be listening to. She and her husband, John, we live in the same neighborhood with them and go to church together, and they have been talking in our community recently about imagination, how we allow our imaginations to get ahead of us. At a parenting workshop last week, John said that worry is a distorted imagination. How good is that? Worry is a distorted imagination.

And we worry about the summer, right? We imagine all the fights and the complaining and the lack of being alone. And those images, they make us feel feelings. They make us get stressed out. and then we're operating within a framework of like summer sucks and please one of my kids go back to school it just spirals really fast now i do want to say that those feelings are valid of course in some of those scenarios they might actually happen they're going to happen but let's not carry them all at the same time right especially within like through a lens of worry and stress you don't

You don't really need like a hundred things to go right in order to enjoy the summer and make it out and skates. It's just a lot of pressure. We're trying to manufacture like a lot of great things happening thing after thing after thing and hoping that maybe they won't fight and maybe they won't ask me the same questions all over the time. Maybe I will get to be alone. You know, like we expect it's all or nothing. We're very all or nothing people. And we spend a lot of mental energy solving imaginary problems. So what is our framework?

If you are a teacher in your home for the summer and you have a lot of expectations about all the rest you're going to have and all the projects you're going to accomplish, what is the best framework to keep you from worrying about imaginary things? If you're a mom of young kids and are terrified that you are not going to be alone for two months, what's the best framework to keep you from worrying about imaginary things? If you have teenagers and you feel like they're all of a sudden these giant humans who drive away in your car and they rarely talk to you anymore, what's the best framework to keep you from worrying about imaginary things? In that parenting workshop, I mentioned, John used the word connection a lot. And I realized that our goal in the summer isn't to survive the summer. It's to connect. it's to connect with our kids, to connect with ourselves, be honest about what we need and ask for help when we need it. We need to connect with our dreams that don't get a lot of attention,

maybe during the repetitive days of the school year. We can connect with our city. You know, we can explore places we don't usually make time for. And if you think about connection, it's small and it's slow, right? We rarely connect with people or experiences when we're rushing, through them when we're not looking people in the eye, when we're distracted by our phones or a task or the real and very desperate desire to be alone. That's a real thing. But when we're not carrying all of that worry, all those expectations, when we're not carrying the responsibility of like our kids exploring nature, of the amazing things that they're going to create when they're bored, because apparently that's when kids do cool things when they're bored,

mine just keep complaining that they're bored. But if I carry their responsibility of what comes out of their boredom, if I try to micromanage, even inside my own head, even like silently to myself, if I try to micromanage what lessons they're learning from the arguments that they're having or from having to like try new foods or have a flexible schedule or whatever it is, I'm going to turn to ash and then I'm going to miss the connection. And so are you. We can't keep carrying it.

all of this. We have to connect and we cannot connect unless we pack light. We need to carry a lot less. So today let's decide what to pack. Let's decide what to carry. Let's decide what your focus is going to be during the summer. How do you feel about connection being the primary goal? It might make you a little bit swirly to think about like sitting on the living room floor reading happy as a hippo, angry as a duck, which is actually a really super cute book by the way. if you have to read it, pro tip. If you have to read it 30 times in a row, use accents. Makes it makes it go by a lot better. But the repetition of that is really maddening, right? And we're not being productive. We're not doing anything unless your priority is connection.

In that moment, the point is to connect with your kid. And other, like other times it might be to connect with yourself or with a friend or with work that makes you feel like a person. But ultimately, connection is what we're after. And when connection is the priority, our squirreliness tends to dissipate a little bit. Want to go electric without sacrificing fun? That's the Volkswagen ID4. All electric and thoughtfully designed to elevate your modern lifestyle. The Volkswagen ID4 is fun to drive with instant acceleration that makes city streets feel like open roads. Plus a refined interior with innovative technology always at your fingertips. The all-electric ID4.

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a special series on how our public space can spark awe, wonder, and enhance the quality of public life. You can find us wherever you listen to your podcasts. Connection requires presence, smallness, and moving slowly, which we don't usually do. And the summer is a great time to start. Now, you might be, like, nodding your head along with me, but you're also wondering how that practically fits into a summer where, like, you want to get to the end of August and everyone still like each other, you know,

and you have to make food and you have to keep your house clean and like all those things. So what are you going to prioritize? So many of us get to the end of the season and we feel like we have nothing to show for it. So what one single thing that when you look back on the summer will have made it a great summer? It's your summer anchor.

We're going to call it your summer anchor. Everything else, it might float kind of within reach, but that one thing is solid and it's absolutely happening. It could be a project, cleaning out the garage, having your yard sale, finishing your book proposal, planting flowers in your yard, anything goes. As long as it's something that feels important enough to be the only thing accomplished all summer, and that is okay. It could be an experience.

Without question, this summer, you want to load up your crew, whatever your crew looks like, in your car and take a spontaneous road trip somewhere. You've been wanting to do that for years and you don't want another summer to go by without it actually happening. It could be a feeling, a practice, a relationship. You want to not yell at your kids and actually listen to them as people and not just as tiny humans who demand crackers every two hours. You want to create some kind of liturgy around your day. Having an ice coffee on the back stoop. I love the word stoop.

lighting a candle and reading a book, meditating for a few minutes, starting the day in your garden, before it's too hot. The options are endless here. They're just endless and very personal. But maybe your summer anchor it needs to be something small

that anchors each day. So whether it's a project or an experience or a feeling, or maybe one in each category if you want, what are you going to pack for? You get to pick. Pack light for that one thing and then leave the rest behind.

This summer, it is all about connection and it is about choosing what matters. It's about having that summer anchor. Okay. So in packing light, though, it doesn't mean, I'm not saying that you're going to abandon like all other obligations and responsibilities, but you know as well as I do, especially if you've been listening to this podcast for a while now, small steps build on each other. Being a genius about one thing, it gives us the freedom to be a genius about others as the need arises and also the freedom to be late. about everything else. But those things still usually get done. They're just not steeped in

expectations and guilt like usual because we're not putting the pressure of ourselves to do all of it. We're just saying the one thing. And anything else that happens is like a bonus. And if you live with other people, I would encourage you to gauge their expectations of the summer too. Like ask your kids, what one thing do you hope we do this summer? Or what one thing would you like to try? What's their summer anchor? They might even like not care about things that you You think they do, and you could just totally mark that off. You know, like movie theaters have those, like summer movies, like daytime movies for, you know, two or three dollars. I'm going to create a post, by the way, at the end of the summer with like a full guide, like all the things that we talk about on the shows on these episodes, but also a lot of things that we don't.

And one of those things is movie nights, which that might work really great for a lot of you. My kids don't like going to movies. And I always like playing in all these movies. And then they're like, I don't really want to go because they don't want to have to sit still for that long. they get scared easily and even like G-rated movies still have like scary things. So like you might actually discover that your kids don't care about some things that you think they do. And then you have the freedom to be like, we're not going to do that thing.

That is so great. Okay. So in terms of like how that works in a family, your summer anchors, there are five people in my house, four of us who are old enough to actually have opinions that we can like put words to. Annie has opinions. She just grunts them. I want to write a book proposal.

Sam, my oldest son, he wants to start drum lessons. Ben, my middle kid, he wants to play with his friend Elizabeth, who hasn't seen, he doesn't go to school with. My husband, Kaiz, he just wants to be with us and, like, take a nap every now and then. We can do those things. We can do those things. We can pack light and make those things happen. We can have everything else revolve around those things, move slowly and making them happen, and we can connect in the spaces in between.

Ben, he cannot play with Elizabeth every day. Sam cannot play the drums every day. I cannot work on my book proposal every day. So how can we keep our anchors important every day and affirm who each other is, are as people, right? And what we want, that those things are valid. How can you do that in your own life and with your own family? We're going to keep it front of mind.

That's why it's an anchor. That's why it's like a central thing. I can have Sam drum on the countertop every morning while we're playing Spotify and making breakfast and connect with his love with music. Ben can draw pictures for Elizabeth. He loves to draw. And so he can draw pictures for Elizabeth until we plan a time for her to actually come over. And I can connect with how tenderhearted he is.

Notice that I said connect with and not connect over, right? We're going to connect over music. We're going to connect over these things. connection doesn't come with an agenda. I'm not putting an expectation of connection on my kids. What I am doing is recognizing who they really are and connecting with those things, with who they are, connecting with what I notice and see in those long summer days that I don't usually get, which feels super overwhelming.

But if I reframe it, I get more time to learn who they are. What a gift that is. That's such a gift. If you're going to be by yourself this summer, you know, if you have the summer off, if you're a teacher or something else like that and you're going to be by yourself this summer, it might feel like, oh, I have all these things to do. But you also get to connect with what matters to you. Connect with dreams that you don't get a chance to really think about.

You know, like this is really a gift. This long-slash summer is a gift to be able to connect. What about me and my summer anchor? Especially if you're a mom at home with little kids, like how are you going to do that thing and connect with yourself when you do have a lot of. people to take care of and you have a lot of responsibilities. I can collect random thoughts for my book proposal in a notebook until I'm able to barricade myself in a Starbucks for a few days and put them together. But in the meantime, I mean, it's not perfect, but I'm valuing something that's

outside of my role as a mom, right? I'm connecting with who I am on a different level and giving myself an opportunity to connect with that every day if it comes up. Recognize recognizing and validating what is important to each individual on a regular basis. It really does help everything else kind of fall into place a little bit. You can make small steps towards those things, even with your kids, even with what they're doing, even with their summer anchor. Keep it small. Keep it present and stay connected.

Back in October, we talked about opening and closing ceremonies for the holidays because Halloween and Thanksgiving and Christmas, they kind of all seem to. fall on top of each other and we never really celebrate anything intentionally. You know, it feels really fast and rushed. The summer is kind of the same. We end it feeling rushed when we're so confused. It was the summer. We should be rested. And then you jump into fall and it's like craziness. So have opening ceremonies for the summer. They can be mental. They don't even have to be like a thing. They can just be a mental marker where you like, you mark the moment and you decide what you're packing light for. They can be physical where you and your feelings.

family, you go out for ice cream and you talk about what you hope happens this summer, what you're going to do? What's everybody's thing that they really want to have habit? It can be whatever you want. But marking the beginning of the summer and choosing just one thing to do or experience or feel, it will immediately release you of a lot of the pressure that you might be feeling right now. When you decide what is important, what's not important becomes more clear. In the coming weeks, we are going to talk about some practical things. It's not just going to be pep talky. like heat and meals and timing and arguments and creating a summer routine, all that stuff.

We are going to get practical. But today, I just want you to pack light. I want you to start preparing for what the summer is going to hold and hold only one thing. When you name what matters most, you realize what doesn't matter as much as you thought it did. And above all of it, our goal is connection. Slow down. release your grip on what you want to happen and what you're afraid will happen and connect with just what's happening right in front of you. Book your people in the eye. Walk slower.

Take longer. Notice where you are and try to stay there. Staying is hard. It is much easier to move to the next thing and check off boxes. But staying is a really beautiful practice that you can begin practicing in really tiny ways this summer. So today. right now. Just spend some time thinking. Think about what your summer anchor could be. Process what it means to connect with your people. And maybe opportunities that you don't get that as much right now during the school year. And then consider how you can purposefully usher in the summer with some kind of opening ceremony. I can't wait to talk to you again next week. I will be live on Instagram this Thursday, around 12-15 Eastern to answer your questions about the episode.

So I hope to see you there. If you don't follow me already there, I am at The Lazy Genius. I appreciate you listening, guys. Thanks for being here with me. And remember, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'll see you next week. Have 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 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.