14. Chaos Causing Stress: Why Reset & Renewal is the Solution to Claiming Your Peace

In this episode we cover the common causes of chaos and the feelings you may experience. 

We also discuss solutions like a reset. This can allow you to see things through a new perspective. 

Peace from your mind overthinking, reliving past experiences or worrying about something that has not happened. An aligned community to support, inspire and uplift can help you reset. I just came back from San Antonio, TX for the 2nd year in a row to join other XClub community members at a retreat with the theme RESET.

In This Episode:

-Do you need help avoid reverting back to old patterns?

-Is chaos affecting your peace?

-What do you want?

Resources for this episode:

-If you loved this episode, please make sure to:

✨️Start here by going to my website, sign up for my free T.I.M.E. Private Mamas Community & check out my FREE checklist for Joy & Fulfillment Now:

When you become part of my private community, this is where you will be invited to all my special events. There is a 5-Day Challenge coming soon...

"It's always time to choose joy & fulfillment," just for Mamas like you that own a business/work in a service industry

 https://www.theintegrativemotherexperience.com

-Leave a review- it helps other mamas find me

-Follow me on Instagram@T.I.M.E.withsarahswift

https://theintegrativemotherexperience.com

Transcript

Sarah Swift 0:20

Welcome to the Integrative Mother Experience Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Swift, wife for twenty-seven years and mother of three teenagers. I want to have conversations about why so many mamas wearing multiple hats, working, serving others, or owning a business, especially in the beauty industry, feel like they need to choose between their work and their family. We'll also uncover common causes of overwhelm, lack of wellbeing, and joy. I am here with over three decades of experience working in the beauty industry, owning several types of businesses starting in my twenties, and sharing stories to help other mothers avoid feeling that they're always missing out. Time is an asset we can't get back. I can't wait to dive into these deep conversations. I hope you will join me. Don't forget to check out my free checklist for joy and fulfillment on my website, theintegrativemotherexperience.com Welcome back. I think you're really going to enjoy this week's episode. Whether it's your business or your personal life, if there's chaos constantly, there is not peace. Are you allowing it, or maybe you are creating it, or both? I know I need to let go or release when my structure and standards are not consistent, and then I know that I've piled on too much. I have to go back, reevaluate where I said yes, and where that was unaligned. I just got back from my second year at a retreat with about 100 other high-achieving either salon owners, studio suite owners, or educators. And let me tell you, learning and connecting, bouncing ideas, and having fun collaborating, it helps me to evolve, and it helps me to know what's possible and get pushed in a way that's so good for my resistance. It opens me up to these new ideas. And for me, it's the next best step. So when you finally decide that you're ready for help, and you invest in a community, and you join, it's a whole different experience. If you're ready to invest in something, my community is ready to have you. We can't wait to have all the moms ready to collaborate and support each other and build this strong foundation. The takeaways from this episode are, have I reverted back to old patterns that no longer serve who I have become? Or is it affecting my peace? And third, what do I actually want? Enjoy this episode. Hello beautiful mamas. Today I want to talk about a word that makes me kinda crazy chaotic, and I want to compare this word with a word that I absolutely love. So let's dive in. In earlier episodes, we talked about protecting your peace and the peace that I'm talking about today is the feeling that you have and that desire of calmness versus the word chaotic. And when I think about chaotic, one of the first examples I think of is in my childhood, and this is not a dig on anyone in my family, but it's an example that I can really, really relate to. And it is our kitchen table. Our kitchen table growing up had piles of paperwork work on it at all times. It drove me crazy. There was a large desk next to the table that was also just completely piled full of paperwork and unorganized. And I would go through these periods where I would try to move all the paperwork off of our table and onto the desk, and it was not well received and it didn't stay that way, and I think about that because it wasn't my space, but it did affect how I felt. So now that I have my own house and I have my own office and my desk, I've made it very clear to my family, this is where I do work and do not dump things on my desk. However, it is a fairly nice sized room. I have a very large desk. I have lots of storage, so there is plenty of room for paperwork in here. It's plenty of room for things to have their place. And it doesn't mean that the Amazon empty boxes get dumped in here. It definitely doesn't mean because you don't want something in your bedroom or in your space that you're going to throw it in my space. because this is where I get creative and I get my work done and I spent so much time again this year. I did Patrice Washington offers a Soul Detox around her birthday every March, and I did it last year and it was one of my best investments because I really do prioritize organizing and I strive really hard to make sure that things do go out as they come in. For example, I just redid my closet recently, meaning everything came out. It was fully, like wiped head to toe, vacuumed cleaned, and lots and lots of clothing that I was no longer wearing went out. And that did allow space for the new items that I brought in. And that feels really good. I actually can see everything so much better, and I found a few items that I really love that I wasn't able to fully see before, even though it was already color coded and fairly organized it, it just needed that, that cleanse. And I felt so blessed this year when Patrice actually offered her Soul detox for free and I did it again, and this year I did it in my office literally. Just listening to it and cleaning out my office again, there was two full like garbage size bags of stuff that left this office when I was done and it felt amazing. And I'm just still in that season of wanting things to be simpler and at ease. So lately we've been doing that in other areas. We took gallons and gallons of paint, quality paint mind you, from our basement from a remodeling project in 2018 and decided, you know what? We're not gonna use these anymore at this point. They're kind of old. We're just going to take photos of the colors and if we want those same colors for any reason, we can easily go to the paint store and have them remade. But we haven't touched them in years, so they're just out of here, gone. We don't need them taking up space and collecting dust anymore. And chaos is something that happens to me when I pile too many things on my mental or physical plate. And when I don't have a proper reset, I notice this happening to me. And I took the time after a recent vacation to once again because I was feeling so renewed and I had resets to actually do this this week, and what I did was put my suitcase back in a storage area that we have, and I noticed a box along with several organized bins of paperwork that I had stored up there, and it was taking up space. And I took them down. I set them in the middle of the kitchen and my husband was in the kitchen and, and I'm like, we are going through this today and I'm going to read you the dates and what some of these things are as I'm putting them in a burn pile, and then I'm gonna have you burn them because I have a feeling that if they're in our storage space that I would really like to use for something else, we probably don't need them anymore. All the important things that I really need. Are in access to me. And so I took it all apart. We went through it all, and now it's burned and it just feels like such a release and the chaotic feeling I had when I went in that storage area simply to put my suitcase away. We have so many travel experiences going on this year, which I feel so blessed to have the opportunity for that. I want to be able to get into the space and move my suitcases in and out very easily, because I'm going to be doing it often. So those are some of my examples. And part of this episode, I do want to actually discuss the reset that comes along with vacation. So it's gonna be a little bit of a twofold episode because when you're feeling chaotic and there's chaos around you. You can't think the same way. And what I've noticed is, I feel a little anxious and I have all all these thoughts and you aren't your thoughts. That's your mind and that's not who you are. And I think about the decade upon decades of chaotic feelings I had, prior to me really doing all of this deep work, and you can't go back and change what was, but you get to decide what you're going to prioritize moving forward. And this is a choice, it's a decision, and it can become a top priority, and nobody's going to create that for you. Nobody created my slow mornings. I created the space myself, and it became a priority. And that is how I start my day because I wanted to start in peace and with a sense of gratefulness, not, oh my gosh, what do I all have to do today? I better do this. I better do that, coffee slashing everywhere. Energy, definitely very chaotic and everybody around me was feeling that, and I don't have that anymore. That's not how I start my day because it is such a priority and I gave myself the permission to slowly sip my coffee. You have to give it to yourself, and if you want help in these areas. I am here for it. This is what I love helping young moms do because I've been there, I've lived it, I understand it fully, and on the other side of the transformation that I've had, there's just no way to explain how different it feels. So your rituals are very important and starting with one step at a time, I believe is the best way to make sure that you're not going to go backwards because you're creating these new, basically foundations that are not familiar in your body. And your body always craves what's familiar, which is why so many times when we decide we're gonna do something new, we have the best intentions. And then before that, three months, 90 day mark hits, we've given up. And that's just so common. So when I want to talk about further is the vacation mindset and choosing things for yourself. I did not grow up with regular vacations. We had experiences at a family trailer on a river. My grandfather loved to fish, loved to fish, and my dad actually loved spending time with my grandfather, which was my mom's dad, and it was such a blessing. We had cousins come with us at times. I was able to spend time with my grandmother, who I always cherished spending time with. She would make the perfect little pancakes and she'd have her apron on and just made everything look so perfect, and it was this tiny little trailer. Literally, when the kids were small enough, somebody would sleep in the bathtub because the water, wasn't working properly in the bathroom. So you, couldn't take a shower and you had to walk to the outhouse just down the road. And so very, very basic, but vacationing wasn't a regular thing for us and we still had these memories of getting away and the reset that created. And I'm grateful for it for sure. But as I got older and I was noticing people around me in my working environment that regularly prioritized these vacations, it became a really strong desire for me, and there were people just like me, and so the desire was there and I could see how it just was a priority. They just made it happen and I would see their photos and my older sister actually helped with that mindset for me because she really wanted to travel. And basically we all knew she was going to move somewhere warm someday. And she did. And she also invested in, at the time it was, a timeshare. And. I know that's not something that's popular anymore, but at the time, it enabled her and her partner to make sure that they got that vacation every year. And I joined her one year and we were talking about it and she was just talking about like how she was just looking so forward to it. And I thought, you know what? She created this and good for her because. Nobody deserves to have a reset and a vacation more than someone else. It's not about working harder or being part of an affluent family where you just have more money than another family in order to earn a vacation, you can create it My husband had gone hunting and made sure that every year he took a pretty lengthy time off of work in order to be able to do this. And it was so interesting because no matter what, this was happening. And so after we got married and I was planning our honeymoon, and he just made it clear, that's fine, but I'm also doing my hunting. And so it was interesting because he was going to get two vacations and I had to kind of figure out, okay, well what does that mean for me? So my attempt was I had earned a two week vacation at the salon I worked at at the time. And because we were, you know, vacationing already, I decided I'm just going to do a stay vacation, stay at home vacation. And at the time I was really into scrapbooking, and it took a lot of time. There was stickers and you're cutting out designs around photos. And so I was going to do this stay vacation, which I, by the way really loved because I do love being with people. And I also like the reset of being alone. And my husband came home from work and I had all these stickers all over the living room. And he's like, well, what did you do today? And it was like, well, I'm on vacation, so this is what I did today. I went and bought more stickers from the lady that was selling them and this is what I'm doing, and he just was so confused. I didn't have any plans for dinner and I was just in my vacation mode, but I was at home. So it kind of created this confusion and a riff, and I can laugh about it now, but it at the time was definitely not appreciated by either of us because we just, we didn't understand And there was some bitterness that came along with that because I made many attempts over the years to try to figure out how to do a vacation, and I just couldn't, you know, it just wasn't a standard. And so after many failed attempts and a lot of years of not vacationing, I finally started trialing an error, some ideas. So over my birthday, which was in January, I would curate a weekend, both prior to children and after where we didn't fly anywhere, but we would just carve out time to go stay somewhere. And that was really fun, but after several years of doing that, again, I was like hearing and noticing and looking at photos of other school families and the dance families at the studio that we were part of always talking about vacationing and I thought, this is just such a norm for people and I'm just, I'm missing this experience. I have to figure out how to create this because nobody is going to do it for me. And my husband would continue to have his yearly hunting excursions and he was quite content with that. Like he wasn't craving booking a vacation with our family and figuring out how we were going to go to somewhere, so it was on me and I did figure it out. And I'm actually pretty good at planning now and at this point, I'm just really blessed because we have done a few vacations with our own family, but my extended family now has started doing these amazing vacations, thanks to my mom who has also, for many years not done a lot of traveling, but always had that desire and she's created these beautiful experiences for us. And I am just so blessed. It's so amazing the places that we've been and watching the cousins interact with each other, having time with our spouses. It was just so incredible on our last vacation, which was very recently, we were at this amazing hotel, and the last day I was on my chair lounging with my coffee sipping, looking at the ocean, and my husband mentioned that he could see dolphins, and I thought, well, here we go again, because he had mentioned it earlier on the vacation, as had a few people on the beach when I was standing waiting for a cabana one day, I heard people talking about having seen dolphins and I didn't see them. Yeah, but this time I did, and not only did I see one dolphin, I ended up seeing four dolphins and they just kept going and going. I bet it was like at least a half an hour. So my husband figures, maybe they were fishing and um, finding a lot to eat in that moment. But we were on these beautiful lounge chairs, sipping our coffee, looking at the ocean, and just watching dolphins. And I'm like, I can't even believe this. This is so amazing. And prior, because there was a larger group on this vacation, and I am definitely the helper, if you will, in the family. I am, I'm the go-to and don't mind organizing things to an extent, but I also do need my reset. I had told everybody in the group chat, I think it was the second day, second day or third day. I will be in my cabana reading a book, and I don't think I used the word emergency, but basically letting everybody know like, if you don't need me for a while, don't bother me because this is what I'm going to be doing. And my husband was not in the group chat and he wasn't part of it at all. So it was really funny to me because everybody was honoring it. And he didn't know about it and certainly could have came and joined me. He's very quiet in a cabana, he likes to be in the shade and he's not super chatty. So eventually he made his way down and I had had a lot of reset time by then and he said that one of my daughters told him, don't go by mom, she's in her cabana. She said, nobody should bother. Her and I, we just started laughing because. I said, well, that didn't mean you, like, you're not, chatty, and you didn't need anything from me. But what I was setting the standard on was I didn't want my phone going off for a period of time, because prior to that, it was either ringing or I was getting messages mostly from my children, but from other relatives as well. And not in a bad way at all, but. Trying to, you know, keep up with a large group of people and, and the needs of children on a vacation is just a job in and of itself. So I claimed that for myself, and it was wonderful and nobody was going to do that for me, and I felt so refreshed when I was done. So I just want to challenge you to take the courage to claim what you want. And figure out what it is that makes you feel like you've had a reset and you feel renewed again. I'm coming to the end of my reset and renewal journal experience. We have less than a week left. It was a 40 day experience, and I will be doing a live, zoom call coming up this weekend, and so all the moms that took advantage of this experience have a chance to have some of their questions answered and share, anything that they wan So if you have anything that you want to ask, please reach out. You know where to find me, the integrative mother experience.com. And as always, have a blessed day. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you found this episode helpful, please follow or subscribe to the Integrative Mother Experience on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen. I would love to have your reviews and ideas of things you'd like me to talk about in the future. And don't forget to go to my website, theintegrativemotherexperience.com. I have an exciting challenge coming up. At the end of May, I will be announcing the information, and you're not going to want to miss it. You can also start by grabbing my free checklist available. So look on theintegrativemotherexperience.com, fill out your information, your first name, and your email, so you can get into my private community and get all the information that you're going to need, so you don't miss out on these beautiful opportunities. Have a blessed day