The Childcare Business Coach
The Childcare Business Coach
Finding Joy and Peace Amidst Life's Challenges
Ever felt the weight of the world on your shoulders, even when everything seems to be going well? That's exactly where I found myself this year, navigating the intertwined exhilaration and daunting moments of 2024. Join me on this emotional journey as I unveil the strategies I've developed to transform negative thoughts into positive ones, using tools like gratitude and praise journals to realign my perspective. I promise you'll uncover tools to help you sift through chaos and unearth beauty and strength even in the most challenging seasons.
Through honest reflections and personal stories, I contemplate the stark difference between fleeting happiness and enduring joy, offering insights into how faith, especially my relationship with Jesus, plays a crucial role in preserving joy and peace. As we approach a busy holiday season, explore how mindful self-care and positive thought management can nurture these essential qualities. My hope is to inspire you to cultivate your own joy and peace, ensuring that no matter the challenges, your spirit remains enriched and resilient.
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Hello and welcome. Let's see I am trying to get on here. Hello and welcome to the Child Care Business Coach Podcast. My name is Evelyn Knight. I am just trying to get my Instagram feed working here. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me.
Speaker 1:You know I'm in a season right now. I am in a season and I don't know I'm such a Christmas person normally, but this season I am really struggling right now. It's been quite the year, I have to say. 2024 has been crazy year and it's good things, bad things, a little bit of everything right, and sometimes that makes it even harder. It's not just the hard things that put us in a season that helps, creates a struggle, but sometimes the good things can be super stressful as well. So if you're like me and you're just in one of those seasons and it's just stressful and heavy right now, I want to talk to you a little bit about how I overcome it.
Speaker 1:This morning, when I woke up, I just felt the heaviness, and normally I'm the type of person I'm super positive usually. So I'm usually the type of person who wakes up excited for my day, excited to just take on life and to do the things that I do, but lately it's been a struggle and I've been having a really hard time just pulling myself out of bed, and that isn't me. There's a lot of things I've noticed lately that just aren't me. I'm just not my happy self. So what do I do in these situations where I'm just not myself and I feel the spirit of depression come over me and even just kind of anger? I was talking to my fiance this morning and he was asking me just some questions and he just said Evelyn, what is going on with you? It feels like you're allowing some bitterness to take over and this isn't you, and for those of you who know me, it isn't. I'm a really joyful person, but things get hard.
Speaker 1:I see Sam you're here, hello, and Sam is a great example. She is fighting out there for us in the insurance industry and trying to make sure that we, as child care providers, have insurance right, and that is one of the many struggles that we're facing right now as leaders in the child care industry, and for those of us who've been doing this for years, it's getting hard, it's getting heavy. I see Lolita there You've been around for a long time and Yolandra and even though a lot of us like Yolandra, and we might be doing really well business wise, it just feels like there's one obstacle after another just coming at us, doesn't it? How many of you tell me in the comments do you feel like there's just so much happening? So much happening that, even if you're striving and you're doing well in your business, there's other things like employees quitting it's hard to hire insurance dropping us, every little thing, parents not wanting to take accountability for their children, staff not wanting to take accountability for being staff members. Feeling like there's just not enough time in the day to juggle it all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but I don't want to be a downer. This isn't me. It's not me. Focusing on all this negativity isn't me. So how do I snap out of it and how do I get myself out of this really hard season? What is it that I do?
Speaker 1:So there's a couple of things I do. First thing I do is I really start analyzing my thoughts. I really stop and I look at myself like, wait a second, what is going on here? Why am I going through this season? What is going on here? Why am I going through this season? No matter what is happening in my life, no matter how upset I am. Whatever, there's always so much good right. There's always more good happening, no matter what. Now my brain may want to hyper focus on the negative, but if I stop and force myself to really think and look around, I will find so much more beauty than I'm going to find the negative, right. So how do I really find that and identify? Well, I start a praise journal, or gratitude. If you're a God girl like me, it's all about the praise, right? Thank you, lord for? And I'll start listing the things I'm thankful for. If you're not just something you're grateful for, like for me right now, just even standing here in my home office, I'm thankful that I even get to work in a home office, right, I'm thankful I am a child care center owner. I'm thankful that I have this beautiful view outside my office windows. There is countless. There's heat running in my home. There is countless, countless things that I can be grateful for. So that's the first thing I do.
Speaker 1:I try to stop focusing on the deficit, right? Because I found that one of the worst things we can do is wake up in a deficit. What does that mean? Well, that means that when you wake up in the morning, your brain goes to all the things that aren't. Your brain goes to what we don't have, all the struggles we're facing, the things we have to deal with. We start our day in a deficit, for example, waking up to a bunch of dishes in the sink right when you don't do the dishes the night before and you walk into the kitchen and you see a pile of dishes, a pile of stuff that you left undone. You're waking up into a deficit. So I started watching things like that and, by the way, I did that this morning. I didn't want to do my dishes last night, so I walk up to a sink full of dishes. I'm already kind of depressed this morning when I woke up because I knew there were some things I have to deal with, and then I added to it because I didn't feel like doing the dishes last night.
Speaker 1:And, as menial as that sounds, it is important. How you start your day is going to set up your entire day right. That mindset I'm in. To set up your entire day right. That mindset I'm in. And I also remind myself that, yes, I woke up to being in a deficit. I woke up with negative thoughts in my mind. I woke up to a sink full of dishes. However, I am not going to allow the first hour of my day to determine the next 14 hours that I'm going to be awake. I have been in situations where I've woken up to pipes bursted right. But I get to choose. Am I going to allow this to affect the next 14 hours of my day?
Speaker 1:How many of you wake up in the morning and think to myself oh, it's going to be an awful day. Oh, my gosh, because first thing in the morning I look at my phone and somebody's calling in, right. Well, you just set yourself up for an awful day. Yeah, it's going to be awful, because that's what you're telling yourself. So instead I look at no, I might've had a not so great hour, which, by the way, I created. I'm going to take full accountability for that as well. I created my not so great hour and I'm still going to have a wonderful day, no matter what I'm facing, because even if I'm facing something hard, I'm still facing 20 other wonderful things. I get to see my kids, I get to do wonderful, happy things, right. So I get to choose where am I going to focus my energy and where am I going to let my brain stay focused. I really like to look at my brain almost like think about a toddler. Right, am I going to just let my brain run wild or am I going to take control of it and choose what thoughts I allow in my head?
Speaker 1:So when I find that worry starting to consume me, one of the first things I'm going to do is grab a piece, a pad of paper. I keep this pad actually by my bedside and I kind of walk around with it. I wrote my notes for this this morning or last night actually, when I couldn't sleep because I was worried and consumed. But I get it out of my head. Normally before I go to bed I'll just write a bunch of stuff out. That way I can just brain dump all the things that are stuck in my head. Get it out, get it on paper. That way I can have a peaceful sleep. When I can't sleep in the middle of the night, I will start just writing just get it out, get it out, get it out.
Speaker 1:Do you know that you use such a significantly more neurons in your brain when you take pen to paper than anything else? I can't even remember. It's something ridiculous. Like 10,000 times the amount of brain activity is happening if you take a piece of paper and pen than if you're texting, typing or anything else. So I do it the old-fashioned way, because I really want my brain thinking what is really deep, deep down inside there that's getting to me, that's stopping me from sleep, making me wake up in a deficit instead of in the positive.
Speaker 1:So the next thing I look at is what is my perspective? Am I really looking at worst case scenarios here or am I focusing on the positive? So I really start looking at where is my mind going and how am I creating this for myself, because I think it's important for us to remember, and especially for me, that a lot of this I'm creating, I am creating the negative energy. So I'm looking at a change in perspective and I challenge myself. I tend to go to worst case scenario, so I'm going to challenge myself to rethink.
Speaker 1:How am I thinking, what is going through my head, how can I fix my thought patterns and how can I reframe what I'm thinking in a more positive life? So, for example, if I have staff members leaving me, my mind is going to go to the oh my gosh. What are we going to do? What are we going to do. Worst case scenario, right. So what if I reframe? I think okay, well, this is going to be a great opportunity to bring someone better in and now I can actually improve, because a year from now I'm going to be so thankful this happened because I'm going to get a much higher quality staff member or something like that. Right, but reframe how and what you're thinking, so important.
Speaker 1:Um, just remember, your life moves in the directions of your thoughts. So if you're thinking negative, like what I was saying, I woke up in a deficit, right, my life is going to move in a deficit. So I have to really be careful because naturally, my amygdala, which is my caveman brain, likes to take over and think of worst case scenarios. Instead, I need to make sure I'm looking at life from a best case scenario, because my life is going to move in the direction of my thoughts. Subconsciously, I'm going to make it happen.
Speaker 1:The next thing I really do is I find someone that I know, I trust and who cares about me, who's going to be real with me, honest and also has a very positive mindset. I'm not going to find someone who's going to jump on my poor me bandwagon. That doesn't help me at all Right, I can do that beautifully myself, making myself feel sorry for myself. Instead, I'm going to go to a trusted friend or someone that I know is going to challenge me and who's going to call me out. And my friend, christina, did this to me a couple of weeks ago, where she just like, hey, your words are really negative, which means your mind is going in a not so great direction right now, and she called me out on my negative thinking patterns. So I will have that person in my life who knows me well enough to call me out, and I have to be okay with that, when she calls me out and tells me hey, evelyn, this isn't you. What's going on here? Why are you going down this negative pattern?
Speaker 1:I can check myself, right, and the last thing I do which is something I will be doing today, right, and the last thing I do, which is something I will be doing today, is I run. I run, I do something physical with my body just to get that energy out. There's a wonderful book called the body keeps the score, and it talks about how all of this anxiety and everything you've been through in your life, it is inside your body. So when I feel the weight of the world on my shoulders, like I do this morning when I woke up. I am going to physically push my body. I need to physically get it out. I've got to get it out, otherwise it just overcomes me. So I'm hoping that those tips help you to overcome your anxiety and really find joy, because you can always have joy in your life.
Speaker 1:Joy and happiness are not the same things. There are going to be seasons of our life where we're not happy. It's just normal, natural for us as humans, and we can still be joyful no matter what. I'm a God girl and I know that Jesus has given me the joy of my life and I, no matter what I'm facing, no matter what is coming at me, no matter what my life looks like. I may not be happy, but I can always have peace and I can always have joy, and these things that I do are the things I do to preserve my peace and joy, because those two things are very important for all of us. And it does take an active stance and a proactive place to make sure that you preserve your joy and your peace. I hope that helps everybody this holiday season. It is the most wonderful time of the year and there is no reason for us to not have joy and peace when we really check our thoughts and do what we need to do to take care of ourselves. Have a wonderful day everybody.