The past few months, I have really had to combat these huge fears that have started to bubble in my mind, which is what today's podcast episode is all about. What I've learned over the past few months is if you don't set a boundary around it, it can begin to consume you and take over your brain almost like a weed in a flower bed. If you don't take care of that weed, it doesn't stay in one spot, it continues to grow, and it grows and it grows until it eventually chokes out all of the other plants in the flower bed.
And the same thing happens in our brain when we allow these worries to fester and not identify them. Are you tired of feeling overwhelmed as you try to balance the never-ending demands of motherhood, life, and you? Hey, mama, I'm Aubrey, a mama three who's been right where you are. Ready for some good news? You don't have to stay stuck. Welcome to the Mom Intentional Podcast, where we tackle the chaos, reclaim your time, and create the life you have been dreaming of. So grab your favorite drink, take a deep breath, and let's get intentional.
Hello, and welcome back to Mom Intentional. I am coming to you from a very different place than normal, and this episode is gonna be a little different as well. I am currently in a going-on-two-week stretch of essentially being homeless, which sounds worse than it is, but we were in the process of getting our floors in our home completely redone. And there were some delays, which I have now learned are actually due to my husband, Mitch, surprising me and basically renovating our entire downstairs of our house.
And so we are getting new everything. So fun, and I didn't pick any of it out except for the flooring, which is all I thought we were doing. So I am certainly in a very exciting and a bit un-homey situation right now, but I'm really enjoying it. And I wanted to just give you guys first a little update on what's been going on behind the scenes at Mom Intentional and in my life, because we're friends. Is that weird that we're friends behind the screen? Probably, but I think of you guys as my friends, and I wanna know always what's going on with my friends.
So I'm gonna update you just a little on what's going on with me. So as I said, we've been homeless for two weeks, and I have a lot of other things that have been coming up throughout the summer. My youngest son just got off a waiting list for a school that we have been looking at for a little bit for him, and he will be going to the new school in the fall that has a different schedule than the school he is currently at. I know that he is going to love it, and he is over the moon, ready to go to school, which is a honestly huge change for us with him, but it is a much shorter schedule.
They do not go to school on Fridays at all, and so I am trying to figure out how I am going to squeeze all of my business and podcasting hours into the much shorter amount of time that I will have without kiddos in the house. My other two boys are getting ready for middle school, which I can't believe. I know I just went through this last year with my oldest starting middle school, but I really cannot believe that I now have two boys going into middle school.
It truly goes by so fast, friends. You blink, and I know middle school-wise is gonna go by even faster because it's only three years long, and my oldest, Nolan, is already in his second year going into his second year of middle school, so I have one more year before my first baby is in high school. I am still a bit in shock and in denial. Business-wise, I have been having so much fun, and I'm sure you guys are tired of hearing it, but I have been having so much fun with the Finding Mom assessment that I rolled out a little bit ago.
It is finally live on my brand new website. We were in the works for the past couple months of changing to a completely different website, which those of you that know me know that technology is not my best strength, and so that has been stressful in itself, and thank goodness I have an amazing husband who is wonderful with technology, but the new website is launched. I love it, and it has the Finding Mom assessment integrated straight into the website, so you can now go there and take the free Finding Mom assessment and immediately get your results of your actual mom strengths, your mom weaknesses, and areas that you can improve in along with specific strategies to help you become more intentional in those areas.
I am having an absolute blast seeing all of my friends and community members in our Facebook community take it and looking at their results and their strengths. com, and click on Finding Mom, and the quiz is right there. You can take it right then and there and see exactly what you are. Are you an achiever? Are you an architect? Are you a nurturer? Are you a creator mom? Are you an explorer mom? There's a lot of different profiles, a lot of information, and it's just been really fun to see how all of these amazing moms within the community thrive.
And on the same website update that I'm giving you guys, we have also launched a brand new tool called Opry AI, which sounds a little funny to even say out loud because again, you guys know I am not great with technology, but this thing is really, really cool. And you can type in any question, any motherhood question, any question on connecting with your kiddos or your spouse or creating a better routine, and get an answer spit straight back out to you. And you can even say, I am a creator mom, and I need help creating a morning routine that I can actually stick to, and it will give you very specific integrated steps that you can take as a creator mom, knowing your strengths and your weaknesses.
So I am really excited about it. I've had so much fun playing with it. So hopefully once you guys go on the website, you'll be able to see it and just mess around with it. Get some information, get some recipes. It's been a really fun tool to integrate into this new website. The last mom intentional announcement that I wanna make is I have a very, very exciting interview that will be coming out here shortly. And it is with an amazing dad. I don't wanna spoil who this guest is, but he is a phenomenal dad who runs a business helping to create other phenomenal dads.
And I am just so excited to be collaborating with him and getting this perspective from the husband and the dad's point of view. I've worked so much with the moms and know so much of what you ladies want to hear more of and want to grow in. But it's really been a blast hearing it from the man's perspective. So I cannot wait to release who that is and release it to you guys here shortly. The last update that I have for you guys is the entire reason that I wanted to create this podcast episode.
Most of you know if you've hung out with me for a little bit know that I for a very long time struggled with a basically mystery chronic illness. Nobody could figure out. I bounced from doctor to doctor. It took seven years to get an answer. The answer also meant that we had to leave our house and all of our possessions and start from scratch during the middle of COVID and sleep on the floor because we had no furniture. And it was a really rough go. But as many of you guys know, I was able to recover once I got my answer after a long, long road.
And I've been doing quite well for many years. However, over the past couple of years, I've started to have some hiccups in my health and started to look back into just some of the extra stuff that comes with when you have a chronic illness. There's always gonna be little hiccups. It's not always gonna go straight up. Unfortunately, sometimes you make progress and you take a step back and you make progress and you take a step back. Similar to all of us in creating a habit, we don't always have the perfect habit creation, right?
We'll decide that we're gonna eat healthy and go a couple weeks of eating only whole foods and drinking all of the water. And then that birthday cake comes straight in front of us and it's our favorite flavor. If it's me, it's a cookie cake, which I used to adore. And we cave and we have that cookie date and we fall back down a little bit. That's kind of how a chronic illness recovery goes. So in the current season, I have gone down a bit and in the midst, I've been searching for, okay, what has caused a bit of a relapse?
What's going on? What can I do to fix it this time? How can I support my body? But of course, in the back of my mind, I've really struggled with worry. And if I'm being honest, panic and anxiety. It's very triggering when you've gone through something that's painful or traumatic to have a similar experience or even similar feelings start to pop up. So for the past few months, I have really had to combat these huge fears that have started to bubble in my mind, which is what today's podcast episode is all about.
What I've learned over the past few months is if you don't set a boundary around it, it can begin to consume you and take over your brain almost like a weed in a flower bed. If you don't take care of that weed, it doesn't stay in one spot. It continues to grow and it grows and it grows until it eventually chokes out all of the other plants in the flower bed. And the same thing happens in our brain when we allow these worries to fester and not identify them, so not become self-aware enough to even identify them, but then not to create boundaries around when it's appropriate to let our minds think about this worry and when it's time to let go and really come back to the present.
And so what I was finding as the last few months have gone on is in the beginning, I was thinking if I just allowed myself to think about all this and what could happen and what I could do to get better and what would happen if the same chronic illness situation started to pop up even more and I got sicker and you can kind of hear the anxiety in my path of thoughts. When I was doing that, in my head, I thought that if I didn't allow myself to think through it, I wasn't gonna come up.
with how to fix this, when reality is, I don't have a clear path to fix this right now. I don't have control, and neither do you. None of us truly, truly have control over our life. We have the opportunity to make choices to increase the probability that certain things are going to happen. But ultimately, only God has control over our lives, no matter what we do. And that's a really hard pill to swallow sometimes. And so as the months were going on this past season, and I was recognizing that my mindset and my worry was beginning to be that weed crowding out all of the good and forcing me to really struggle to be present, I decided to try a technique that I had heard about a long time ago, and it's the idea of scheduling a time to worry.
Now I know it sounds absolutely insane, like who wants to actually put on a calendar a time to worry? Isn't that the opposite of what we want to do? And usually I would say yes, but if you're in a season like I am right now, where you've got something on your heart that is really affecting you, maybe it's an old trauma, maybe it's grief, maybe it's fear, anxiety, sadness, but whatever negative emotion it is or that it's producing, if you can think about scheduling a time to think about that and give it a box, give it a boundary, and then every time that your mind goes to that worry or that thought, you remind yourself that that thought can safely go into the keepsake box, and at the appropriate time that you have scheduled, you can pull it out and you can let your mind go crazy thinking about it.
It can go all over that thought, and it can think about it the entire time. Make sure you have a timer going, and once your timer goes off, you take the thought and you put it back in the box in your brain, you close it up, and you tell yourself that you can come back to it tomorrow at your scheduled time. But until then, it's time to move on with life. Now I know that this might sound a little crazy, but I would say don't diss it till you try it, girls, because it really has worked for me.
And I've done a lot of different things to distract myself and to focus on the positive, and those things often work for me. I've done a lot of work in the past on reframing and creating new neural pathways. That was a huge part of my recovery from my chronic illness. But sometimes there are times in our life when the typical strategies that we have used don't work, maybe because the trigger is so powerful. Maybe we're just in a weak, tired time. Maybe we've been carrying something for far too long and we're just exhausted of fighting.
This is a really simple way to give yourself peace and instant presence. And I can say from personal experience, dealing with the trauma of recognizing that my health has had some major backsides that I'm not fully in control of right now, this has been a game changer for me. So next time that you find yourself in a situation where you really can't get your mind and your heart off of something, something is really bothering you, someone has really hurt you, something is making you sad, or you're terrified, or you're traumatized, or you're just feeling anxious, I encourage you to schedule a time to worry.
Don't allow it to be too long. My time is 10 minutes. And then every time that that thought comes up and it's not your scheduled time, tell it to go back in the box, close it up, and begin to focus on what you're grateful for. Begin to focus on what is around you presently, or busy yourself, distract yourself. There's power in distraction. I hope that this scheduling time to worry and putting your worry in a box idea helps you the next time that you find yourself and your thoughts spiraling.
And if you haven't yet gotten to take that Finding Mom quiz, I encourage you, go check out my new website that I am so excited about. Take the quiz. You'll get instant answers into what your strengths are, what your weaknesses are, and tailored specific steps that you can take to begin to feel more in control, more peace, and more joy in your life immediately, all based on your personality results. All right, mamas, until next time, schedule a time to worry and go win your day. Hey, mama, I hope today's episode sparked a fire in you to take action and start living with intention.
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