Episodes

Feel like you are shopping too much? Want to bring a minimalist approach and mindset into how you shop? Every season we seem to be bombarded with the latest fashion trends – a marketing strategy that fast fashion uses to get us to keep buying all the latest colours and patterns. I know I feel like I need to buy a new wardrobe each season and need to remind myself of everything I already DO have in my closet. In this episode, I will talk about WHY we shop, how to know when it is causing a probl...

I challenged you to get uncomfortable this week. Now I want to dig into doing simple things that serve a bigger purpose. Giving your discomfort a purpose to work towards the vision and goals you have for your life. I want to break it down, keep it simple, and encourage you to drop your all-or-nothing mindset. This past weekend I did another Abundance Day (aka Yes Day) with my kids. Last year I did this and shared my takeaways in this episode “I let my kids do whatever they wanted all day” Dis...

I love comfort (#typeninevibes) and I know that a lot of my comfort-seeking is more the AVOIDANCE of discomfort. I don’t want to be uncomfortable. What things make you uncomfortable? For me they have been things like: Taking my small kids out in public Working on the conflicts in my marriage Exercise Getting up in the mornings Doing dishes Decluttering and organizing my home Seeing my kid struggle or be upset Go to a social event I was nervous about Sitting with all the stress and anxiety I f...

Looking for ways to have more fun in motherhood and BE more fun as a mom? I have asked myself this question too. Inside of our FB Group – Simple on Purpose Community, there comes a great question. The question was in essence, I can DO fun things with my kids, take them to swim, skate, and stuff, but how do I HAVE fun with my kids? How do I BE fun? In this episode, I’m going to elaborate on how I responded to that question. When motherhood becomes too serious and the fun mom you once were disapp...

It’s back to school time! Are you ready? I know we have been enjoying the slow pace of summer and will need to put ourselves back on schedule to make back to school run more smoothly. Over the years we have developed routines that we rely on in our school and workweek. I want to share our three favourites with you as you think about how you want to start out this new school year as a family. How routines help our kids and us for school days We can rely on routines to get stuff done. It gives ...

How did your summer go? Anything you wish you that you did more of or less of? Today I have a PROMPT episode for you – where I will prompt you through some helpful questions that I hope will help you live more intentionally. Specifically, having a summer on PURPOSE. So let’s take a minute to stop and reflect on the ways you want to improve next summer by noting what you learned from THIS summer. I share a bit of my story about having my kids close together in age learning I had the CHOICE to...

Procrastination is an avoidant strategy and there are so many layers to it, why we do it, how to redirect it, how to accept it, and so on. It is also something almost everyone does and something that can cause a lot of shame, especially for moms What is procrastination? It is putting something off for later. We all do it, everday. We put off phone calls and chores and errands. So how do we know if we simply PRIORITIZING our time and energy of it we are procrastinating? Why we procrastinate ...

When an actor is typecast, they are locked into being cast for a certain TYPE of character, always a version of the same thing. And as parents, we can typecast our own kids. We give them labels on what they are – difficult, athletic, flighty, dramatic. We can also give them seemingly positive labels – like smart, pretty, nice – and those can have impacts on them as well. I want to empower you with: awareness around the labels you might give your kids, how it can impact your parenting experie...

I have been researching goals and habits since we started setting them in 2015. You can hear Conor share his take on doing this work as a couple in this episode. Over the years I have searched to the ends of Pinterest and tried a lot of strategies to create habits for myself. I was doing this work fueled by the notion that I had to become a morning person now that I was a mom. I was thinking that habits would make me the optimal human, efficient and productive. I have since learned to bring g...

Andrea is a Registered Dietician who is here to talk with me about our relationship to food and teaching our kids a healthy relationship with food I also had a secret motive in asking her on because I had questions about how to handle food with my kids. I know I’m undoing a lot of cultured rules, how I was raised, my own biases, and I want to be mindful about how I teach my kids, especially my daughter, about the health of food without the food guilt or body shame. In this conversation we will ...

This is a Q+A episode featuring questions from the Simple Squad (the Simple on Purpose Facebook Community). We are talking about feelings, marriage, seasons of life, parenting and family chores. These answers are coming at you from my life coaching point of view. I am a mom of three kids, trained Life Coach, practical minimalist, and I help moms with intentional living. Questions covered in this episode: 1. Can you talk about the seasons of life and how we can’t do certain things at certain s...

Expectation overwhelm is when you have a to-do list that is so long that it overwhelms you. This starts a defeating cycle of hustling, beating ourselves up for not doing ‘enough’, and not really feeling empowered to live a life of purpose. Feeling productive and the beliefs we have about how we spend our time Coach women a lot on productivity and procrastination They feel like they can’t get things done in the day They want to be better at getting things done. And it is the same issue on both ...

Do you struggle in your relationship to getting dressed each day? Do you feel guilty for it, or lack confidence in it? Jaime McLaughlin is a hair and make-up artist who is helping moms take care of themselves without the mom guilt. In this episode we talk about the internal shifts we can make, the judgments we might have of ourselves and other moms based on what they wear, busting myths around how much money and time it takes to get ready each day, and tips to build a capsule wardrobe Using th...

When we think about being home with the kids for the summer there can be a lot to dread AND be excited about in this season. I have found my way out of that mental overwhelm is to make a plan on what what I DO want my summer to be. Over the years of planning our seasons as a family, we have developed an approach that helps us stay flexible, work around the hurdles and show up even on hard days. I want to share the main points with you here. This episode has a companion workbook that takes you ...

As moms who want to have hobbies and do things they love we get bogged down with notions that we have to monetize our hobby, or that we have to be exceptional at it. We almost use these as measurements to determine if this hobby is ‘worth it’ in the time, energy, and money it could involve. I want to pitch the Joy of Being Mediocre and how it can unhook the hustle from the hobby and allow enjoyment to come into the hobby rather than expectation. Full episode transcript is available at the end ...

Do you wish you made time for the things you enjoy? Maybe you aren’t sure what hobbies you would like, or you think you aren’t ‘creative enough’ to have hobbies. I have encouragement for the mom who feels guilty that she doesn’t enjoy her time, but also feels guilty when she isn’t ‘productive enough’ Siobhan Johnes from the Unlocked Creative is sharing her insights and tips to help moms make more time for the things they love to do. For the woman who says ‘I’m just not ‘creative” What it mea...

This is not the house I would have chosen to be my forever home, but over the years I have come to terms with us staying here – but how to reconcile with the dissatisfaction of this home not being exactly what I want. Acknowledging our home dissatisfaction Recognizing that deep desire to create a space that FEELS like home Addressing the longing we have to change our homes How we handle our dissatisfaction Working with a partner to build a home together Having different ideas on what a hom...

This is the LIVE recording from a Facebook Live held earlier today in the Simple on Purpose Community group I am answering FAQs and addressing the myths we might have about emotional intelligence and emotion coaching our kids. I have been emotion coaching my kids for years now and I have noticed such a huge difference in my own relationship to my emotions and how I handle theirs and help them problem solve. Here are some of the myths and FAQs on emotional intelligence that I am addressing: Wh...

Health class may of taught us about anatomy, maybe our moms taught us about how to manage a period (but if you are like me, you just figured it out on your own reading the pamphlets in confusion and piecing together crumbs from Seventeen magazine). And then we start going through life, having babies, experiencing postpartum, living momlife and we realize that this whole ‘WOMAN’ thing is more than just knowing what products to use and how to use them. We learn that there is a whole-body wisdom t...

As we talked a lot about emotional intelligence, I want to move over to the physical side of emotional awareness. So often we just ignore our bodies and treat them as something that slows us down – but I’ve learned through experience, health problems, and researching the SCIENCE that listening to our bodies is vital. It helps us have a better awareness of ways we need to respond, more emotional freedom and it brings us out of living on the surface of our thoughts and into the experience of our l...

I have had some great questions on how to teach our kids emotional intelligence – and I will answer them in this episode. I will also run through the 5 steps I use (and learned from John Gottman) on how to walk our kids through their emotions and misbehaviours – also called emotion coaching. This episode follows up on 119, about tolerating the emotions in ourselves and in our kids. The 5 steps to teaching our kids emotional intelligence, as I have learned through the work of John Gottman (my s...

I want to run through the steps of teaching your kids emotional intelligence. And to lay the groundwork for that, let’s take a minute to explore our relationship to uncomfortable emotions. We are conditioned to view certain emotions as acceptable and unacceptable – and this causes us to have a low tolerance for these emotions that show up in ourselves and in our kids. Emotional intelligence is important for moms because it helps us to walk them through their own emotions from a more tolerant, a...

There is an emotional experience of motherhood that can feel dark, angry, exhausting, hopeless. Some of us even experience postpartum depression or other hormonal imbalances that impact our emotional experience. Is joy still available to us in these really tough times? Does joy mean I’m always happy? Does joy mean it comes easy? Can I find joy in things OUTSIDE of motherhood? This is my conversation with Jenna about these topics. Jenna is a mom of two (with one on the way) and she hosts The J...

What does it mean to be ‘Emotionally Intelligent’? How can this help you in motherhood and your life? I’m sharing the basics of Emotional Intelligence (aka EQ) and giving you my take on where each Enneagram Type can develop and round out their EQ The basics of emotional intelligence In a nutshell, EQ is being aware of feelings and managing those feelings in yourself and in your relationships (socially). I’m looking at the info out there on this topic and summing it up into four major themes ...