ITUNES | SPOTIFY
The holidays are here, and the list keeps growing. Gifts, cards, menus, family plans, and everything already on your plate. But what separates a season with energy to spare from one where you're scrambling at the end often comes down to one thing: how quickly you decide.
Every open loop (which card design to choose, which gift, whose house, green beans or carrots) drains your time and energy until you close it. In this solo episode, I’m sharing why swift decisions are the biggest favor you can do for yourself this season.
You’ll hear how a simple gift decision and a family gathering plan change once you decide, how to ask, “how much time is this decision worth?”, and how to batch your decisions so they actually get made.
And if you want to build your holiday plan and your to-decide list with me, join me for the Stress Less This Holiday workshop this Thursday, November 5 at 12:00 PM ET. Tickets are $29 at www.themothernurture.com/holiday.
Links and resources mentioned in this episode:
Get your ticket for Stress Less This Holiday - www.themothernurture.com/holiday
Learn more about coaching with Katelyn - www.themothernurture.com
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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. Hey, hey, welcome back to another episode of the podcast, and happy November. If you're in the US and listening to this in real time, I hope you're getting out to vote today. It is Election Day. I just, I can't believe, I can't believe it. We ate all the candy this weekend for Halloween. I posted some pictures on my Instagram. If you didn't see those, we were a family of eyeballs, , which was a lot of fun. We got a lot of comments and questions on those as we were trick-or-treating. We survived daylight savings time, or are still surviving it. , I adjust to the fall one pretty easily. I was up early this morning. It actually helped me get up early, and I'm hoping to hang on to that. I hope that you did okay on what feels like a very long day on that first day where you ... It just keeps going. That day just keeps going. And I've talked to many of you over the last couple of weeks about this end of the year. We are into the end of the year, these last two months, the holiday season, et cetera, and so many of you have said, "It just doesn't feel real to me yet." Like, it hasn't really sunk in that the holidays are here, that we're gonna be in 2027 in two months, and I know. I get it, and I actually feel that, too. I've been promoting my holiday planning workshop for the last few weeks, and it hasn't felt real to me either. But today, today it feels real. The first Monday in November , it's like the switch has officially been flipped. Do you feel that, too? Isn't that wild how that happens? It feels like go time. It feels like game time. I have been going through the holiday workbook myself. It is so good. I always love to do that in advance of leading you all through it. And I had this realization as I was planning my own holiday season that I wanted to share with you, because I have absolutely been in that situation where I start out in November really strong. It's the first week of November. I feel like I'm going to own the season. You know what I mean? Right? I'm gonna plan ahead, I'm gonna get things done, I'm gonna have time and energy to spare. And then time just flies. Work doesn't stop. The homework, if you're in the homework phase with your kids, that doesn't stop. The invites, the things at school or through daycare, all, all of it, it doesn't stop. And before you know it, it's Black Friday, and you are not where you thought you'd be. Circumstances definitely play a role. There have been years where I've gotten sick, or the kids have gotten sick, where my husband travels a lot in those last two months of the year, or where work gets really busy, and I just don't have as much time as I thought I would to get all of the things done But besides circumstances, the thing that makes the biggest difference, the difference between consistently moving through the to-do list with time and energy to spare at the end versus scrambling to get it all done, often sacrificing sleep or workouts or just settling for whatever you can fit in, is swift decision-making. Making early and decisive decisions. I wanna walk you through a couple of examples to share what I mean because I hope this helps you in a way that it is really helping me right now to own my actions, to own the role that I can play in creating this season, the experience of this season that I wanna have. So I think gift giving is a pretty simple example to use. When you decide maybe that you wanna get your mom a Lola blanket. I, that popped into my Instagram feed this morning, and so that's just top of mind. I don't know if I'm getting my mom a Lola blanket. I don't think she listens to the podcast, but that's just what's top of mind for me. So you decide that that's a great choice, so you put it on your list, on your gift-giving list, Mom, Lola blanket, and then you wait for the sale. That was what was on my feed this morning. I think they were ... They're 50% off right now. I don't know for how long. If that's on your list, maybe you wanna go check that out right now. So you get the blanket, and you get it for 50% off, which is a great deal, because they're not cheap. It arrives, you wrap it up, and you check it off the list. Mom, done. And here is the game changer. You can now stop looking. You don't have to skim the gift guides, what to get your mom. You don't have to read the articles or watch videos on what to buy the mom who has everything, who doesn't want anything. You get to put blinders on and move on to the next thing. Maybe it's the next gift, I don't know, the next task that you need to complete in this endless task list for the holidays. So not only is that to-do item completed, you no longer have to entertain other options. You decide that the Lola blanket is good enough because it's done. It's wrapped. It's done Another example might be figuring out, you know, the holiday travel, the family gatherings, orchestrating who you're gonna see when How many times have you gone back and forth About whose house and which date and who's available, where are you gonna gather, and how to make it fair. My sister and I had a conversation last week about this. I've talked in years past. We have my family, my, my immediate family of five, my kids have four sets of grandparents. That's a lot of different family groupings to try to see. We don't always see everyone every year. , but it's a lot, and it's, it's a stressful juggle. And so my sister and I were talking, you know, about the groups that she and I are both a part of, and at first we kind of defaulted to our old ways, which was just tossing out a lot of options. "We could do this," or, "Yeah, we could do that," or, "Maybe we could see, you know, Mom here and Dad here, and what if we did your house there and my house here?" And okay, yeah, those, those are some good options. But then we were like, "No, no, no." Actually, that one arrangement that we tossed out, that would work fine. That, that would work fine. I can't think of anything better in the moment, so why don't we just do that? We don't need to leave it as an open loop. We could close it right here, together, right now. And when you do that, you move from considering the options, thinking about more options, to switching gears into actually executing. When we decide that that arrangement works fine, we can then send the text to everybody. We can start to organize the meal. We can plan games if we wanna do that, check in on arrival times, who's gonna stay where. I- is everybody gonna stay over? Now that you know the dates, each individual family can start to make their arrangements We get further faster By making the decision early So whether it's the holiday card design, the gift that you need to buy, the menu that you're putting together, the cookies that you're going to bake, the decorations you're going to procure this year, the faster you can decide, the further you get and the more energy that you save. Those open loops, "Oh, should we go with this design or that design?" "Should I address the envelopes or should I pay to have them addressed?" "Should I get her this thing or this thing?" Right? "Do we wanna serve green beans or carrots?" "Should I make cutout cookies or peanut blossoms?" They're all great options. You really can't go wrong, and you do yourself the biggest favor by just deciding. You get to close off those other options, the weighing of pros and cons, the researching, the talking it over, the thinking about it, just the energy drain of the open loop. It's like a leaky bucket. All of those open loops are just leaking energy out of the bucket Close them, decide, move on to the execution phase That is how you save energy and time. Now, Even if they are fun decisions, you might love menu planning or gift giving. Just because you make a faster decision doesn't mean it's still not enjoyable. You don't have to stretch it out to enjoy it. You can enjoy the swift decision-making and then move on to the wrapping or to, the actual cooking or the getting of all the ingredients, whatever it is that you enjoy. Then you get to actually get into the doing. It just means that you're not giving it all of your time and energy, because trust me, there's always more to do and more to decide, and time goes faster the further we get into the season. It just does One question that I will often ask myself when planning my time just day to day in my planner is how much time is this task worth? Maybe you ask yourself a similar question as you approach the holidays. How much time is this decision worth? Maybe there are some decisions that are worth a little bit more time because they carry more weight, they carry greater consequences. But there are so many decisions in our holiday plans that we give more time to than they actually deserve One of my favorite parts of the Stress Less, This Holiday workshop is, of course, getting all of those tasks and project plans out onto paper and getting them spaced out on the calendar So we make that consistent, steady progress over the next two months. But I especially love creating the to decide list. I love seeing all of my decisions in one place and then batching them. Usually for, for me, that looks like sitting down with my husband, and we just go through them one by one and decide. We don't get up from the table or end the conversation until the decisions have been made. It is a game changer, and for any of those decisions where I don't need to talk about them with him or have him weigh in, my challenge to myself is to decide faster. If you'd like to join us to create those lists and have a plan that you will actually have time to complete because it's all mapped out, and because you understand the importance of making those decisions more quickly, I would love for you to join us this Thursday. It's not too late. We can plan everything together. It's so much fun to do it in this group. I hope you'll consider joining us. And if you remember anything this season, I hope that you remember that you will get further by making faster decisions All right, until the next episode, I hope you take care. I'll talk to you soon Thanks for listening. As always, you can find everything from this episode in the show notes at themothernurture.com/podcast. And if you've been meaning to plan the holidays, this is your sign. Stress Less This Holiday is live on November 5th. Buy your ticket, hold the time, and we will plan it all out together. Go to themothernurture.com/holiday to save your seat, and I can't wait to plan with you
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