Episodes

Motherhood is hard, but sometimes we make it harder than it needs to be by becoming a Mom Martyr. I would know, I was one. I was knee-deep in the work and struggles of motherhood and I needed everyone to know it. However, the way I was showing up and handling life and motherhood was actually making my life harder (cue the marriage counselling!) Reflecting back on where I was at, what I see I actually needed was to address my own personal doubts and fears and lack of enjoyment in motherhood. ...

Should we be happy all the time? What does it mean if you aren’t happy? What are you doing in an effort to get happy and stay happy? This podcast episode has been on my heart for a while. I knew I wanted to talk about what I call THE HUSTLE FOR HAPPINESS. This has been one of my harder lessons in life – a lesson that came to me through parenting and feeling like I was losing the race for happiness way too often. It is also a lesson I have the pleasure of teaching other women in life coaching. I ...

Why have toys if your kids aren’t playing with them? Sure an option is to declutter the toys they don’t enjoy or seem to use. We can declutter the excess. But still, our kids aren’t always interested in playing with their toys. At least not as interested as they are in following us around the house whining that they are bored. Do you feel like your kids have a lot of toys but don’t seem to be interested in them like they used to? To a kid, the logical option is to buy a new toy – but we all kno...

Restlessness, we all have felt it in our lives and especially motherhood. Because it is this weird mix of waiting, mundane chores, and mental chatter around relaxing. I asked the Facebook community what we should work on as a challenge for the month of July and there were great ideas around this general uplifting in our lives. As I talked with my besties, Sophie and Rae, about it they told me they were feeling restless lately. Restless! Exactly! That is what I was feeling too and when I looked...

We know there is power in enjoying the simple components that make up our day to day life. When we can enjoy these simple things, we have so much more ability to enjoy our actual life. But often the ‘shine wears off’ and the things/people/experiences we wanted and enjoyed fall flat. That happiness we experienced is gone. From a life coaching point of view, it is because we still bring our brain with us wherever we go. Our brain, and all it’s thoughts and stories and autopilot and subconscious ...

Today’s bonus episode comes after I showed pictures of my pantry on Instagram and mentioned love languages and got a lot of comments about it. While we’re in isolation, my wonderful husband, when he’s home from work for the week, has been doing the grocery shopping and the meal prep while I work. But when he puts away the groceries, he does not appreciate my pantry system at all. There’s onions and potatoes together. There’s nuts in the grain section. It’s just madness! I could get upset or I ...

I was asked to share some of our experience with kids doing chores. I think it is a great subject because a lot of us want to raise kids who know the discipline and skill of chores, but we don’t want it to be this big huge fight that ends up creating a tense and stressful situation for us and our kids. In this episode, I’m sharing our strategies, tips and mindset for how we handle kid chores in our home. It doesn’t mean it is always happy, or easy – but we are focussing on the process more than...

Raise your hand if you think dishes are dumb. And maybe you’ve googled ‘disposable clothing for kids’ in a desperate hope you could avoid the constant laundry. I know that there are women out there who are rocking chores, and there are women who aren’t’, and there are a lot of us between. We know that a clean house makes us FEEL peaceful and happy. But we also know that we have more motivation to click ‘keep watching’ than we do to get on the third load of dishes for the day. If this has been y...

What would make your life better right now? It is a wonderful thing to long for change, we can listen closely to that part of us that sees room to explore another way, maybe a better way. We all have change in our lives – some of it is a change we don’t want, some change we do want, some changes we want but we don’t know how to accomplish. Our relationship to change can look a lot of ways but it will always be met by this hurdle: knowing and accepting what is in our POWER to change? THE MAKI...

We have all been taking stock of what isolation life looks like in comparison on how our life used to look. Sometimes this experience can be painful and disempower us as we move through these days of staying at home. Going through a lot of things we ‘don’t want to’ can really highlight the things that we DO want and crave. This episode is part two about the things I’m learning while in isolation and how I’m contrasting my current experience with what I want to move into in my post-pandemic lif...

I’ve been hearing this sentiment a lot lately: when we all get back to normal, decide what you want your ‘normal’ to be. Even if you are someone who pays attention to your life and tries to make it intentional and simple, this time in isolation has changed our routines and patterns enough that we are able to learn new things about how we had been showing up for our lives. In these next two episodes, I am going to run through the different areas of my life that I am paying attention to right now...

What day is it anymore? We don’t know. But we know we are hungry…..probably…I’m pretty sure. Or bored. Maybe. What day is it again? Imagine this conversation being had by every person in your home. Cause our brain is melting a little bit without some sort of schedule and agenda. Rather than stay in this fog of wiping chip crumbs off our devices and smelling which sweats are clean enough to wear, perhaps it might help to give your day some framework that works for you and your kids at home. Af...

I’ve had requests to talk about resilience and endurance during this time where moms are home with their kids in isolation. ENDURANCE Endurance is responding to stress for a duration of time. We can endure a certain amount of stress but eventually we burn out. RESILIENCE Then we turn to resilience: the ability to bounce back from stress. I think this is the place a lot of us moms are in right now. We have endured the first two weeks of isolation and now we realize that this is how things w...

Stepping back to look at your anxiety from a life coaching point of view and tools to help you accept and work through it. Advice from a life coach and mom of three. What is anxiety? What causes it? The way we react to it, and how it makes the struggle even harder How can we react to it instead: acknowledge it is there accept that it is with you, without running off with it calm the nervous system unpack the mental narration unburden the mental clutter decide how you want to show up (w...

Think back on this past week, what kind of memories do you have from your motherhood experience? I recently listened to Meik Wiking talk about the Art of Making Memories and it got me thinking about how we treat our memories and how they can impact our motherhood experience in positive or negative ways. Full transcript at the bottom of this post. RELATED LINKS Read this episode as a blog post When did I stop enjoying my kids (podcast episode) (blog post) Life on Purpose Workbook The Perfect...

A look at the before and after of how minimalism changed my marriage, my homemaking and my life. In the last episode (#51) I shared specifically how minimalism changed my motherhood. IN THIS EPISODE How minimalism has changed my marriage: respect + responsibility, shared vision for our home, being at home How minimalism has changed my homemaking: more manageable, better ‘flow’ for homemaking, calmer, reclaimed my role as Homemaker How minimalism has changed my life: more proactive. doing th...

What is different in my mothering since I have decluttered my home. A reader (Hi Melissa!) asked me to share on this topic. In this episode I’ll share FOUR WAYS minimalism has changed my motherhood. (In the next one I’ll share how it has changed my marriage, homemaking and life). IN THIS EPISODE Weird things I am googling: fancy coffees, hot 90s country, celebrity family trees, the contestants from extreme makeover and currency inflation How minimalism has changed my mothering: a family cult...

This is a super FUN episode! I asked the FB group and Instagram friends for the topics they want to hear me talk about on the 50th episode. I have a couple of great topics I’ll be sharing on today. The first, and major one, is the topic of things I have done as a mom that I never expected to do. I think we all have those ‘WHAT IS MY ACTUAL LIFE??? moments’ as moms where we are wiping up pee with our sock and rolling out to the grocery store with a head full of kid barrettes. So, I rolled thro...

Change will always be part of our lives. Whether we want it, don’t want, know what to do with it, or how to make the next step – we are always faced with change in and around us. So how can we move from feeling like a victim, or stuck, or confused – to being proactive with how we show up and handle change in our lives? The growth mindset is something that can really impact our ability to embrace and learn from the change in our lives. When we can spot where we might have the opposite (fixed mi...

How to be brave with your life when you a mom who sometimes goes a whole day before realizing your shirt is on inside out. Welcome to the Simple Saturdays Podcast. I’m Shawna, mom of three living in small-town Canada. I have been blogging for about seven years on my journey to simplify my home and life – and to live my life on purpose. I have been writing about the journey and life coaching other women who want to show up for their lives with more purpose, passion and peace. Today we are talkin...

Want to live life with more purpose? 5 years ago we stumbled upon our first ‘life on purpose’ conversation and since then we spend time each New Year to talk about how the year went and what we want in the year to come. I asked Conor if we could have some of this conversation in front of the microphone and share it on the podcast. . . . Things we covered on this episode: How Life on Purpose has changed for us over the years Reflecting on the goals we have had over the years The experience o...

Do you long to be more present, more mindful, more intentional in your life? A major step in this is listening to your life, to your heart and to others in your life. This is the third part of the SHOW UP FOR YOUR LIFE SERIES Step one: Pay attention Step two: Listen closer Step three: Be brave Today we are talking about: what it means to LISTEN to your life, to those around you, to your heart how to assess the listening landscape of your home and family seek first to understand, then to u...

Dear mama, do you feel like you are on autopilot, overwhelmed, and losing passion for your life? How would it change things if you decided to SHOW UP FOR YOUR LIFE? You know, the life you DO have. I want to give you some guidance and strategies to help you do this. This is PART TWO to the Show Up For Your Life Series. In the first part, we talked about what it means to show up for your life, how to know if you are doing it and what it looks like. There are three steps to showing up for your l...

From one mom to another, showing up for our life is the hard work of being present, proactive and purposeful. I’m sharing my journey in showing up for my own life and giving you steps and insights to use that will help you SHOW UP FOR YOUR LIFE. Read the full post here on Showing Up For Your Life What does it mean to show up for your life? It means being responsible It means being active and not passive It is more than just ‘productivity’ It is about living in line with who you are and wh...