Episode 17 FINAL
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Welcome to the Feast Life, where we empower you, the modern homeschool mom, to create a life and homeschool you love, one founded on faith, family, freedom, and fun. I'm your host Julie Ross, creator of the award winning homeschool curriculum, A Gentle Feast, and a certified Christian life coach. For more information on today's episode and to access my free gift for you, check out thefeastlife. me. Charlotte Mason once said, life should be all living, not a mere tedious passing of time. So on this show, we seek to savor the feast of life. Girl, grab your favorite beverage and pull up a chair. You are welcome at this table.
And we'll get started. I know your time is so important and I do not take for granted that you have hopped on with me today. My prayer is that it will be refreshing to you and equip you with some new knowledge and information for your homeschool and just give you a new perspective.
I know this time of year can be so challenging and we can so easily lose sight of why we're doing what we're doing and just trying to get back into the groove after the holidays can be so hard. And I am praying that this will bless you and your family.
So let's get started. Today we're going to be focusing on your purpose. Just write in a journal for today, but there is some prompts that you're going to want to help you with this focus on our purpose for today. So those will be something that we'll be doing after the call's over. You can just write the answers in a journal too.
All right, so I wanted to start off with just sharing a little bit of my story and tie that into what we're going to be talking about today with our purpose. Those are my five kiddos. I have two adult kids and then a 15, 14 and 13 year old. So when I first started homeschooling, I was a former public school teacher and so I just did what I knew, which was school at home.
So we had a bunch of, I mean, I was only homeschooling my older two at that time. It was amazing how many workbooks and textbooks and like things we had all over the place. And, I tried to do, I, we even did the pledge of the flag and we had a little calendar time and I was like recess time.
And I, I made it exactly like school at home. And within a very short period of time, I was completely burnt out. I was very frustrated. It was not creating the atmosphere and the joy that I wanted when I first decided that I wanted to homeschool. And thankfully, I was able over time to fully embrace more of Charlotte Mason's philosophy and actually figure out what that actually was, because 20 years ago, all we had were like Yahoo groups to try to figure this stuff out.
And yeah, we didn't have Amazon so I couldn't order her volumes like it was much harder back then. And as I started to understand more of what she was saying and how to teach it transformed our homeschool and I developed a certain rhythm and a flow for a day and that became what the curriculum is that I published called A Gentle Feast.
That was huge. That transition totally transformed my life and my children's. Our days were filled with so much more beauty and connection and being out in nature. And it was so just life giving is how I describe this transformation to Charlotte Mason homeschooling. But. I still felt like something was missing.
I was still really struggling, and what I was actually, I realized, struggling with was life. Because we can't separate life from homeschooling. Can I get an amen?
Hardship still happens, right? And learning how to deal with those. Has transformed my life and my homeschool as well. So I struggled with all kinds of things, even though my homeschool had changed, we were moving, we moved back and forth across the country within a nine month period.
And then we moved four more times in five years. I had three babies in three years. We had learning challenges. I had health issues and my Children had health issues. I had undiagnosed ADHD, which I finally realized at age 42 and some of my Children as well. I had relationship trauma to work through.
I was starting a business and trying to grow that and working at the same time. I'm trying to homeschool. And just had a very general lack of support for life and homeschooling, both. So can anybody relate to any of those challenges?
And what was happening was those things were so emotionally consuming for me, and I didn't know how to process those in a healthy way. And then that was affecting how I was showing up every day in my homeschool. And it wasn't giving me the results that I wanted and the connection that I wanted with my kids.
And even though we had our days full of beauty and living books and all these wonderful things, I had this huge emptiness inside of me. I suffered from one day itis. So let me explain what one day itis is. One day itis is I believed that things would be easier, I would be happier, I would feel better. One day.
And these were some of my one days. I'll feel better when the baby sleeps through the night. I'll feel better when the toddler is potty trained. Homeschooling will be easier when everybody can read. It'll be better when everyone can work independently. When my marriage is better. When we get used to living in this new town, when I learned to be more organized, that was going to solve, that was a big one for me.
All my problems will be magically solved once I can learn to be more organized and get into control of everything. Or when I get in control of my health and I start to feel better, then everything will fall into place. And it wasn't until my daughter was a senior in high school, my oldest daughter, that, and we're looking at college and all these things that it hit me.
One day isn't coming. And I had wasted so many years. Just surviving each day, waiting for one day to come, because I believe that the solution to my problems was out here. That the reason I had so much stress and difficult emotions that I was trying to deal with within myself were because of all these circumstances that I mentioned to you, right?
And they were all out here. And once these were all figured out, and once I didn't have to deal with these anymore, then everything would magically get easier. And I realized that one day was never coming. And I decided that this was going to be day one. So instead of waiting for one day. I was going to take control of my life and make this day one, and I was going to get help, and I was going to figure out what was missing, and I was going to learn how to change myself, because I couldn't change these circumstances.
Some of them did change, right? We stopped moving and different things. But. There's always something else, like I said about last night, right? It's oh, okay, now here's the new thing that we're going to work through. And learning how to deal with my, in myself. Now I'm like, like last night, I was like, if this would have happened several years ago, this would totally have derailed me.
I would be like lying on the floor in the bathroom and be like, I'm not, I can't function. I can't, I got to cancel this thing. We're not doing it today because of all the stress and emotions and things that were happening in the hospital last night. But thankfully, because I've learned some of these tools that I'm going to share a little bit with you through our time together during this workshop, I was like, okay, this is 1 more obstacle.
I know how to deal with it. We're going to work through it and to keep moving forward. So I took a leap of faith. I hired a life coach for myself, which was a huge investment, and I never invested anything in myself. And I spent several years working through different working with one life coach, but working through different life coach programs as well.
And I liked it so much that I decided to become one myself because I saw the transformation in it. It happened in my life. And I wanted to share those tools and resources with other people. So you are in the right place if you are feeling overwhelmed. Anybody feeling that? Trying to balance your homeschool and your life.
Maybe some of you have part time jobs. Maybe you're trying to, balance a lot of different activities or volunteer things that you're doing or just The home, right? And all the chores and things that we have to manage on that front as well. It can feel so overwhelming. It's a lot. Maybe you're feeling doubt, wondering if you're doing the right thing.
Are we doing enough? Should I change this or that? You're always questioning your choices and wondering like, when am I going to finally feel like confident? Yes, I made the right choice. Perhaps you're feeling burnout that no matter what system you have going on or what rhythm or what curriculum or what like short chart or whatever, there's never enough time to fill your own cup that it's I'm always just pouring out from nothing and I am not spending any time on my personal interests or.
I'm just always spending spending, and I don't know how to figure that out. And so then you do end up feeling really burnt out. So if you can relate to any of those feelings, that overwhelm, that doubt, that burn out, you are in the right place.
So today we're going to focus on our purpose. So are you more focused on your problems than your purpose? This is so easy to do because the problems are right in front of our face, right? And they're so big and they're happening constantly. And it's so easy to become focused on all the things that are going wrong in our life and in our homeschool.
And the more that we focus on our problems, the bigger they become. Because we're putting so much thought and so much energy into them and they're consuming our minds. I would like to challenge you to spend as much time focusing on your purpose, thinking thoughts about that instead of the problems. And it takes trust and faith to do that because it's if I don't think about this 24 7, then I won't be able to find a solution.
And then this problem is always going to be there and I just got to solve it and I got to solve it like yesterday. And so I got to figure this problem out. And we put so much stress on ourselves trying to come up with a solution to the problem that we don't allow ourselves to have possibilities when we are so stressed.
We're in that flight. I always struggle saying this flight, fight or freeze mode. Our brains actually can't think and we come up with solutions or we try different things that are often very controlling and we're moving out of a place of fear instead of faith. So focusing on our purpose. What do I mean by purpose?
What are those things that make you unique that you bring to your homeschool? Why are you homeschooling in the first place? What do you want your homeschool to look like? What do you want to do in your homeschool? What do you want your children to be like someday? Why are you doing this? Because when you have clarity on your purpose, it gives you motivation and it gives you that certainty.
So when the problems do come up, and they're going to, and they're going to keep coming. They don't derail you, they don't derail your thinking, your feelings, they don't derail your entire day, because you know what, I'm determined, this is what I'm here for, this is why we're doing this. And so we're going to do some exercises but these will help you gain that certainty and that clarity with your purpose that is going to give you that motivation and clarity so that you can work through those problems and you can deal with them better.
Today's episode is brought to you by A Gentle Feast. A Gentle Feast offers a complete living books curriculum, an award winning early reading program, and more tools to equip you to apply Charlotte Mason's timeless philosophy into your modern homeschool. Go to agentlefeast. com to check it out. Smooth and easy days are closer than you think.
Alright, so there's two aspects to knowing your purpose. The first one is appreciating your uniqueness. And the second one is creating a compelling vision.
So I'm going to break these two apart for you. So the first one appreciating your uniqueness. God has put your kids in your life and in your homeschool for a reason. You are the best person to homeschool your children because you know them inside out better than anybody else. Their unique quirks, their motivations.
And here's the thing. Our children know that stems that stuff about us and they like to push our buttons. Anybody else? Because they know all of that because we're with each other so much. So knowing who you are and what strengths you bring to your homeschool is so key. Today, I just want to touch on this when it comes to your purpose, because I think sometimes we forget that and we try to make our homeschool look like everybody else's.
And I had the same thought, that my homeschool had to look a certain way. If I was a Charlotte Mason homeschool mom, we had to our house had to look this way, and we had to have this kind of atmosphere, and I had to like, to do these things, and read these books and live this way, and if I didn't like those things, then I wasn't being a Charlotte Mason homeschool mom, or I wasn't doing it right.
And I felt so trapped and miserable because they weren't actually things that were life giving for me. My expectation of what that looked like and who I was as a person were two totally different things. And so we want to bring our expectations and who we are together. So that's my family. And we are dressed like that because we went to see an ABBA tribute band.
So I love disco, and when I saw this ABBA tribute band was coming, I'm like, Oh my gosh, homeschool field trip. We are going to see the ABBA tribute band. And I actually have a whole entire bin full of disco outfits. So the kids are actually wearing my clothes and I'm like, kids, this is going to be so much fun.
Everybody get an outfit. We're going to dress up. It's going to be great. And my kids are like, are you sure mom? Are other people going to be dressed up at this thing? And I'm like, of course they are. It's going to be great. We get there and we are the only people dress up. Everybody else is jeans, sweatshirts, normal clothes.
And we were the youngest people by many years. I would say the average age was upper 60s of this crowd. And none of them were dancing. And, which I can't sit still normally, but especially when there's disco music on, I really can't sit still. And so we were able to go in the back corner and we were up there.
We were dancing. We were having a great time. And afterwards, so many people came up to me. And they were like, I loved seeing your family dressed up. I loved seeing your kids dancing and that the fact that they knew this music. Like, how do they know this kind of music? Most kids these days don't listen to this kind of stuff.
And it brought me so much joy to watch your family. And afterward, it struck me that by me being myself with my kids and us doing this crazy wild thing together, I was able to bring joy to other people. And that's what happens in your homeschool. When you are doing things that light you up, you're It lights your kids up too.
As you have more joy, you show up differently. And so we would take disco breaks in the middle of our homeschool. Now I'm not telling, this is not for everybody. Most people listening to this are probably like, that sounds horrible. I would hate that. So this is not the point. The point is to find something that you actually like to do, that actually lights you up, that has your unique quirks and things that you're super interested in and to see how you can bring that.
Even if it's just five minutes. I mean, we didn't spend a whole unit study on the history of disco music. Okay. It was, how can we add this little thing that I think is super fun into our days? Because when you're having more fun, it completely changes the atmosphere of your home. I hear all the time.
How can I make history or geography or something more fun for my kid or my kid doesn't like this subject. I need to make it more fun. I was like, start with you. Are you having fun? Or most days, are you like, it's time for school. Everybody come on. Like when you are having fun and you're fully alive, your kids see that they feel that energy and things will start to slowly change.
So instead of again, focusing on the problem, my kid doesn't like this or my kid doesn't want to do X, Y, Z focus on your purpose. So my purpose is to just love my kids and connect with them. And when I'm being me, I can connect with them better. So here's why you need to be your unique self. So first of all, it's inspiring.
Your kids see you learning a new hobby. Learning a new skill, playing the kind of music and doing the things that you like to do, it inspires them to explore their own interests and do things that make them happy and they're excited about. They might go on some kind of rabbit trail because you're super excited about something and they got interested in it and you just never know where that would take off.
Like I've been shocked with some of the things that I've introduced because I really like it. Like musical theater is a big, another big thing that we love around here and we sing and we dance all the time to musicals and stuff to see my, some of my kids take off on that kind of path. So it's not like you need to do what I'm doing, but when they see me doing something that I really love, it inspires them as well.
It builds connection. When you are doing the things that bring your joy, your kids see you not just as mom or homeschool teacher lady, they see you as a real person. Who has interests and things that you are wanting to do, and you can have conversations about them, and it helps build that connection with you.
Plus it makes really fun memories sometimes too, like that ABBA thing, I don't think my kids will ever forget that. It brings a joy in learning again, because when they see your enthusiasm, when they see you, learning something. They go, Oh, I wonder what I could learn about. Mom's really interested in sourdough bread or underwater basket weaving or whatever it is.
And maybe, what could she be really interested in and learn too? It's so cool. She's so excited about these new crime documentaries she's been watching. I wonder what would interest me as well. And then the last one, it builds resilience. So when you come up against challenges and your kids see you doing that and persevering through that.
It helps build resilience in them that they can overcome their learning challenges. Several years back now, I decided I wanted to run a half marathon. And that was a big stretch for me and quite the process. And during the race, my kids were at the finish line and I was at mile 10. And I wanted to quit and I text my oldest daughter and I'm like there's a cafe up the road here.
I'm just going to hang out here. Cause I'm done now. And how about you come pick me up when the race is over? And so she texts me, she's mom, we are all waiting at the finish line for you. And there's Girl Scout cookies. And I was like, okay, I'm there. I will run three more miles to get the Girl Scout cookies.
Of course, by the time I got there, there were no more Girl Scout cookies, but it's okay. But all I could think about was those last three miles is I want to show my kids what's possible. I want to show them that I did not quit. I will not let them see me quit. I am not quitting. And I just kept repeating that to myself.
So if we just Stay doing the same things we've always done, and we don't try to learn new things or grow in our personal lives. Our kids don't see us overcoming challenges. They think everything's just supposed to be easy rainbows and then when they come up against a challenge in their own life They don't have the skills to navigate that so we need to be working through our own challenges Stretching and growing ourselves and being uncomfortable sometimes so that they see that but that also that we can have empathy for them When they're growing and stretching and learning new things that are really hard to go Oh, yeah, I remember when I tried to learn that I tried to learn guitar a couple years ago, too That was horrible.
But I learned a lot of things about myself and my habits and those kind of things. And that helps me relate to my children better when they're learning new things as well. So what is the unique superpower you can bring into your homeschool? You all have things that you are unique at. There is not one size fits all homeschooling at all.
What can you bring to make things more fun and enriching for your days? What's something maybe you've always wanted to learn how to do? Maybe you could start spending some time learning that, and we'll talk when we ever get to planning about how to plan for the things that are priorities. But this is the priority, and I believe it.
I didn't always think that. Again, like I said, my Things, my personal interests and the self care practices that I had were way down at the list. And if there was extra time in the day, I could maybe get to that thing. But by filling that in first, everything else still gets done. It doesn't consume me.
It's not a huge thing, but it's shown me the power of being myself and having joy in learning new things and overcoming challenges and how that's changed our atmosphere that has helped me with my purpose. So God has given you unique gifts. That only you can bring to your homeschool. So spend some time when those worksheets are going to help you get clarity on your values and what things are meaningful to you.
But I want you to also think about what's something fun, what's something just quirky about you that you might want to bring in as well. All right, and then number two, in order to have purpose, we need to have a compelling vision. Compelling means you feel it when you oh, I homeschool because that's what I'm supposed to do.
And that doesn't really feel compelling. I've heard the quote, your why should make you cry. You should be. This is the most important thing to me. You should feel emotion with it. And we're going to talk about passion tomorrow and feel passionate about whatever that vision is. And your vision does not have to look the same as your friends or some homeschool expert or what somebody else says.
Your vision has to be unique to you and your family. As you're going through these worksheets, talk to your spouse. Why are we homeschooling? What is their values? What is actually important to us? And are we actually putting that into our day? That will be on day three with our planning. One of my favorite verses is Proverbs 29, 18, where there's no vision that people perish.
And I so felt this. I felt like I was perishing because I was just living the same day over and over again, just trying to survive. Not feeling fulfilled and bringing my purpose into what I was doing on a regular basis. And I didn't have that vision to compel me when things were hard and where things were challenging.
I just wanted to give up and not keep going. And that's why we need a vision. It makes you feel alive, right? You're not perishing. You're full of life and energy and enthusiasm and motivation. That's what your vision should do for you. And if it's not doing that for you, you need to really look at your vision.
Alright, so without clear direction, we don't have a vision. When we don't know where we're going, we can just wander in circles. If I want to go get a hamburger, I put into Google Maps. Where is the nearest hamburger place and it gives me turn by turn directions to get there. If I don't know where I'm going, I'm hungry, I think I'm just gonna drive around and maybe I'll find some place that I want to eat, right?
We kind of approach that sometimes with our homeschool I'm just gonna try to figure this out, I don't really know where my vision is, what my priorities are, what are the non negotiables for my family, I don't know. And what happens when we don't know those things and we don't have a clear direction?
First of all, we get stuck in what I call analysis paralysis. Analysis paralysis is when we're overthinking and we're analyzing everything and everything's a problem and I gotta figure out a solution to this and it paralyzes us. We can't move forward. It consumes our thoughts. And again, we suffer from that one day, and once I figured this thing out, then everything will be easier.
So I gotta figure this thing out, and I gotta figure it out right now. And we can just keep thinking about it over and over again, and never getting anywhere, because we're stuck in just analyzing it. We make decisions out of fear over faith. When we don't have a clear direction, we don't have that trust within ourselves to go, No, this is the path I'm on.
This is what we determined our priorities are. We're going to say no to that. We're going to say yes to this. We're going to trust in the process and trust that, my child's going to get X, Y, Z over time or whatever that is for you, whatever that purpose is. And that vision to keep going, even when those obstacles are there, you can have that determination and that faith when you have a clear vision.
And we can file pray to shiny object syndrome. Anybody I spent years of my homeschool ball and pray to shiny object syndrome. Oh, what's my friend doing? Oh, what's this person on Instagram? Instagram wasn't around. But what's this person on Instagram doing? Or what's the new curriculum? Or what's the new thing?
And we feel like we're being tossed by the wind. We start this, and it doesn't feel good, so we stop it, and then we try this. And then that doesn't feel good. And so we're moving around and then we wonder why we're not getting consistent results because we're not taking consistent action down a certain path to know where we're going.
Now is it always a straight road? Here's my direction. No, absolutely not. But at least when we get thrown off our path. When we lose sight of where we're going, we can get back on the road because we actually know what that is and where we're trying to get to. All right, and then when we don't have a clear direction, our days are filled with the tyranny of the urgent.
Because we don't know what our priorities are, we can say yes to everything. We whatever that little fire is that is coming up throughout our day, we're focusing on that instead of focusing on what our values are and what our priorities are. And so we get exhausted because we have spent all day playing a game of Whack A Mole.
Have any of you ever seen those like at the arcades? There's you have a mallet and then there's these little moles that pop up and you have to keep like hitting them. And then at the end of the day, you wonder why you're so tired. Because you didn't have a plan. You didn't have that clear direction with your purpose.
And so it just, what's important now? What's important now? Oh, here's the new problem. Here's the new thing. And we don't have that. Time for the things that are meaningful and it's exhausting to be playing that game and putting out those fires all day long.
Like I said, so the first one is helping you to identify your values. So again, these are just like little journal prompts to get you thinking and get you into a place. There are some value words here, the circle. These things are the most important to me. Then what you're going to do on the next page is think about your gift or your value and then how are you going to actually bring that into your daily life?
If my value is, let me go show you an example. The 1st, 1 is family. I think it's important to most of us that are on this call, right? If my priority is family, how am I going to bring that into my daily life? Are we having connected family time? Maybe that could be in the morning, if you do like a morning time practice.
Are we spending time together as a family in the evening? We're not just rushing around from a million activities, but we can, even if we are, we connect before we go to sleep every night. We have check ins with each other. And there's a million different ways to meet those values. And when we know what our purpose is and what our priorities are, we can be creative and we don't get stuck in that analysis paralysis is a shift.
Can I combine my seventh grader and my fifth grader for geography or what math curriculum should I use or handwriting is not working, so I need a new hand like we can get so focused on those problems and then we realize, oh, wait, my value is family and we didn't have any connected family time this week.
That's why it's so important to know what your values are and make sure those go into your plan. And the last my favorites. Setting your vision for your home school, even if you've done this before, I really encourage you just to do it again after today's call. Write about what you do actually believe about education.
How do I think children should be learning? What do I think is important? Why am I even doing this in the first place? And then I love these last two. Describing the adults your children want to be and having a vision for that. I shared this on Instagram yesterday. Yesterday was my oldest daughter's birthday.
And when she was a baby I tried to do a women's Bible study and she had colic. So they were always calling me to come to the nursery and sit with her. I never actually got to go to the Bible study. But in the nursery were homeschooled teenage girls. And I would just sit there and I would just talk to them.
I was like, wow, these girls are so mature and articulate and kind hearted. I want this for my daughter. I want this the baby that I had. I hadn't even heard of homeschooling before. That was not a thing that people talked about in those days. And so I was like, this is the vision of what I want.
And having that vision and then now having an adult child, it's very cool to see. I was so glad that I had that vision and who I wanted my children to be. And obviously we can't always control that. But we want to have a path and know where we're going. And then how do you feel at the end of your homeschool journey?
I don't want to feel like I'm like limping across the finish line. Oh, thank God it's over. No, I want to get to the end of my homeschool journey and for my kids, my older two, I've already done this for them, when they graduate high school, we go on a trip together. I was like, this is your graduation gift, but I deserve a trip too, because I worked really hard to get you to this place.
And my last child, we just went to England, like two summers ago, we had the best time. That's how I want to feel at the end of my homeschool. I want them to be excited about learning so that we're still doing fun things and having these conversations. We have this connected relationship. Yeah, whatever it is for you, but getting clarity on that will really help.
Bye everyone. Have a wonderful day.
Hey there, Julie Ross here. I just wanted to say thank you for listening to today's episode. If you like this show, it would mean the world to me. If you would leave a positive review in iTunes, this really does help people learn about the podcast and each month I will pick a winner to receive a free gift. Don't forget to check out all the free resources we created for you at thefeastlife. me. Thank you.
