Episode 21: There's No Such Thing as a Normal Week
ITUNES | SPOTIFY
As working parents with kids, work, and a life to take care of, there's "always something". What is a "normal" week anyway? It's probably one where everything went according to plan. But is that really realistic to expect? I would argue that "abnormal" weeks are the norm and the sooner we come to expect that, the easier it is to be flexible when plans change. In this episode, I'm sharing personal anecdotes and client stories to highlight the importance of flexibility, lowering expectations, and celebrating small wins to manage the unpredictable weeks, plus the phrase that I use instead of "it is what it is."
In this episode, you’ll learn…
00:00 My holiday recap
01:55 The Myth of a "normal" week
08:24 Embracing the unexpected
09:10 Celebrating wins and being flexible
11:33 Acknowledging how you feel so you can accept
13:09 Why abnormal weeks make so much sense
links & resources mentioned in this episode:
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You are listening to the Life Coach for Working Moms podcast, the show where we are talking about what it actually takes to make life work as a working mom. I'm your host, Katelyn Denning, a full time working mom of three and a certified life and executive coach. I'm so glad you're here and I hope you enjoy this week's episode
Hello, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. How are you? Did you have a great holiday? If you celebrated Thanksgiving like we did here in the States last week,
I was just looking through my pictures as a part of my monthly wrap up, which you can listen to,
Episode. Three of the podcast if you want to learn more about my monthly wrap up routine and what that is but anyway, I was sorting through my pictures as I do at the end of every month and Looking at just the last week alone, and I had already forgotten things that we'd done At the beginning of the week, there was so much.
My kids were off school for the entire week. My daughter celebrated her birthday on Wednesday while we did her party with friends the Saturday before, my first ever kid or friend birthday party in my 10 years of parenting. And then her actual birthday as a family on Wednesday, traveled on Thursday for Thanksgiving, celebrated her birthday again with her grandfather, my father in law's birthday, then traveled on to another set of grandparents where we celebrated my stepdad's birthday, along with my daughter's birthday again, and All of the activities and things that we did in between just to entertain ourselves and get through the week without school and then of course, come back and we've got just a couple of weeks before winter break and decorating and all sorts of things.
So hopefully for those of you who joined me for stress less this holiday, the workshop, hopefully you're feeling good about your plans, your intention for the season, and you're just in that stage of execution. If not, it's not too late. You can, get the replay email me, at hello at the mother nurture.
com if you'd like a link to that, or send me a DM over an Instagram. So. We're going to do it. We're going to keep checking in here every Tuesday throughout the month of December. I'll give you a little pep talk. I'm right there with you. We're doing it every week. We're doing it. So maybe along those lines, as you think about what is coming up this week and how we just are packing so much into things week by week, I want to talk about the idea of a quote unquote normal.
Week. And we can just assume moving forward that anytime I discuss or, or say normal week, you can picture me with my air quotes around it, right? What is normal?
But I know for so many of you right now, this is coming up. There's always something, isn't there? There's always something. When we look at the calendar, new things are getting added every day. I got notice this morning of a pajama day. That's coming up at school for my youngest. We've got last minute field trips that are getting added to the calendar as they want to squeeze them in this month of December, I'm sure actually.
Mark my words, I'm sure this week we'll get some sort of flyer about one of those themed weeks or spirit weeks where you dress up with something different every day. I'm sure they're gonna try to squeeze that in before, and I hesitate to even bring up illnesses because I don't want to jinx anything, but It is the season as well of kids waking up with a cold, or a fever, or a stomach bug, and
and that's not even talking about The things that are out of the ordinary illnesses, of course, you're not expecting that necessarily, but you know, there are plenty of things on the calendar that make our weeks not normal, but that we are planning on my husband's early board meeting, the well child visit for my daughter who just celebrated her birthday, getting our flu shots or going to the orthodontist.
Those things are on the calendar. But they take time out of what would be a normal work week or a normal school week. And it just goes to show that there really is no such thing as a normal week. What is normal anyway? I guess if I were to define that, what is a normal week? I think it would be a work week or a week where everyone goes to school Monday through Friday, normal hours, regular hours.
I work, my husband works, and maybe dinner goes according to plan, and I'm able to anticipate or plan for everything. Maybe said another way, a normal week would be where your plan matches reality, or where your plan matches the outcome, what actually happened. And what about that makes it the gold standard?
I guess it's because there's no surprises. It's predictable, and we feel like we're in control. Now, what most parents learn very quickly Well, I'm not going to say learn very quickly. I think some parents, it takes us a long time to learn these lessons, but you start to see the signs, you start to see the hints as a new parent in particular, that those normal weeks are few and far between.
Now, It certainly depends on your circumstances and how old your kids are, and I would also say how many kids you have. I think the number of quote unquote normal weeks that I have had has decreased with each kid that I've added to our family. That, if I said that correctly, that makes sense. I'm thinking of a client of mine recently who is coming to this realization.
She has a six month old baby and went from a very predictable, organized, scheduled life to one that now feels very unpredictable with a six month old baby. You know, one week it's something with the house that has to be dealt with, then it was looking for new child care or, or supplemental child care.
Then it was, getting vaccines and, sleep regression. And then her husband was sick, and then we go into the holidays. And she said, I didn't expect it to be like this.
That's the problem with expectations. And trust me, I'm right up there with you if you also have expectations. I can't help myself. But our expectation is that we will have a normal week. And then when we don't have a normal week, because there's something that comes up, either that we planned on, or that's unexpected, it's wrong.
Right, that abnormal week is the outlier, we think, when really, those outliers are probably more normal than the normal weeks. I wonder what the data would show. I wonder if you were to go back through your calendar for the year, would the data show that there were more predictable weeks where everything went according to plan, just as you expected it to, where your expectations were aligned?
With the actual outcomes for your week, or would the data show how flexible you actually were? Would you look at that data and be amazed at how much you accomplished this year, despite having more weeks that looked abnormal than normal?
I actually do track this. I haven't consolidated or summarized the numbers for this year yet. Actually, I should make a note to do that. That would be really interesting. I'll share it. Maybe I'll put it over on Instagram if you're interested in that. But. I am almost positive that the data shows I have significantly more abnormal weeks than I have normal weeks.
Now, part of that is I've actually gotten good at anticipating the unexpected. I have space in our calendar and in our schedule and just in my mindset as well for those unexpected things, but a week where everyone goes to school and to work and to our scheduled activities as planned, those are not the norm.
And the problem really comes down to how we react. To those abnormal weeks, when something pops up, when a kid gets sick or something in the house breaks, or you have to go to a doctor's appointment or scramble to buy a last minute gift for the birthday you forgot, or you have to pull together a snack to send into school for this thing that wasn't on the calendar.
Are you able to flow with it? Are you able to be flexible and rearrange or drop the things that you need to, to accommodate this unexpected thing and then pick back up with what's most important? Or does it frustrate or exasperate you to no end? I had a client share a win with me following this holiday weekend.
And that's something that we do with all of my clients. There's, research to support how important it is to celebrate your wins. I actually did an entire podcast episode on it because I think this is so important, whether you're coaching with me or not.
You can check it out, episode 12, called Reclaiming Joy. But anyway, I had this client share her win with me in between our sessions
and she was sharing that their Family holiday was as she put it a mild shit show, but that She was proud of herself because she did a great job of just allowing when she could have gotten really annoyed and Frustrated because of what a mess it all was And instead, she was able to just get through it, get home, and even laugh about it the next day.
The unexpected thing, or even the expected thing that's out of the ordinary, the thing that means you'll have less work time, or less sleep, or you'll have to do work in the evenings just to keep up, that thing already sucks. It's already put a wrinkle in the week. It already has some implication. And you layering on your thoughts about how it wasn't supposed to be like this, or you never have a normal week, and it's so hard, right?
I can't remember the last time I had a normal week. It just means that you are the one who ends up suffering. Now, I don't love the phrase, it is what it is, because I think it's so overused that it's lost its meaning or value, right? Oh, it is what it is. But I do like to remind myself that this just wasn't what I expected or that my plans are going to have to change because my week has changed.
Cause most of the time, there's not much you can do to change the fact that, I don't know, your car won't start, or the heat in your house is broken, or a kid is sick, or a last minute project at work has to now become the top priority. And I think that's what my client meant by saying she allowed it. She acknowledged that it wasn't what she expected, probably wasn't even what she wanted,
acknowledged that this isn't the week I thought I'd have. It's like acknowledging your kid when you see that they're sad, or angry, or frustrated. Right, I see that you are really sad about that, or I see you're really frustrated that you can't, cut that circle the way you wanted. We all just want to be seen.
We want how we feel to be acknowledged. This isn't the week you thought you'd have. Now, what do you want to do instead? How do you want to solve for this? How do you want to move forward? What do you want to do in order to move forward? There's something powerful in acknowledging that there's no such thing as a normal week.
I really challenge that that we use these words normal, right, best, What do they mean? Who decides what's normal? Who decides what's right? Who decides what's best? Well, you do.
There's no such thing as a normal week. You can expect to have a curveball. You can expect something unexpected. Now, you can also certainly be pleasantly surprised if it turns out to be a week just like you expected it to be. But you don't have to be surprised when it's anything but normal. That's my life with three kids and a business and a partner who works a demanding full time job and a house that always needs something and the full life that I have.
It makes so much sense that there's always something.
And I'm guessing it makes a lot of sense for you as well. It's like they say, what's the, what's the saying? A messy house is just proof that you live there, that someone lives here. And what if a plan doesn't go according to plan is proof that you're out living life. And that life just looks different week to week.
That life is where the abnormal is normal. Where there is no such thing as a normal week.
If you want to learn and practice the skill of allowing, of being flexible when things don't go according to plan, I encourage you to fill out a coaching application to learn more about how we could work together. I am accepting clients. Starting in January, it's the perfect time to think about your priorities and to be intentional with how you're spending your time.
You can submit your quick application over on my website at themothernurture. com forward slash application and I will say cheers to another abnormal week and I hope you take care and I'll talk to you soon.
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