Episode 60: My Personal Wellness Revolution

In Episode 60 of "Wellness in Every Season," titled "Nurturing the Branches: My Personal Wellness Revolution," Autumn Carter takes listeners on an intimate journey through her life as a mother, student, and eventual life coach. This unique self-interview unveils her transformation and the creation of her impactful programs, "Stay-at-home-mom to Dream Job Mom" and "Reclaim Your Time." Autumn shares how each dimension of wellness influenced her journey and offers insights on achieving balance in life's various roles.

Listeners will gain valuable strategies for enhancing daily routines, transforming both mornings and evenings into empowering experiences. Through her personal stories and expert advice, Autumn provides a pathway for mothers to reclaim time and rediscover their identity beyond motherhood.

In this episode, Autumn extends a special invitation to her audience: for those eager to sample her approach to reimagining daily routines, a free guide is available. This resource is designed to provide practical tips and insights for transforming morning and evening routines, echoing the philosophy of her 'Reclaim Your Time' program. To access this free guide and begin your journey toward balanced and fulfilling days, visit https://wellness-in-every-season.ck.page.

Join Autumn in this empowering episode as she guides you through the seasons of motherhood and wellness, offering tools and inspiration to nurture every dimension of your wellbeing.

For more wellness tips and exclusive content, join my newsletter! Sign up now at wellness-in-every-season.ck.page and receive a free 5-day guide called "Awaken and Unwind: 5 Days to Mastering Moms Life's Mornings and Evenings." Plus, you'll get free guides, special offers on my programs, practical tips, personal stories, and so much more. Don't miss out on these valuable resources designed to help you thrive as a mom and as an individual. Join today and start your journey to wellness in every season!

Transcript

Welcome to wellness and every season, the place where we explore the rich tapestry of motherhood and wellness and all its forms. I'm Autumn Carter, your host guide and life coach.

In today's heartfelt 60th episode. We're going to share a journey together. It conversation as deeply personal, because today I am interviewing myself. So it's just you, me and myself exploring the winding paths of motherhood and the rich landscape of wellness that has been my guide and sanctuary.

There is something profoundly beautiful in the quiet moments of early motherhood. Where the world sleeps and you're awake. Cradling, not just your child, but your dreams. It is in those silent hours, balancing motherhood with textbooks and with the soft glow of the computer screen that I found my calling. I found my voice and a story I wanted to share. A story that might just echo in the hearts of other mothers too.

 This is when I discovered my calling to be a life coach. I discovered with each of my four children that I profoundly changed with each birth. And. It took a while for me to figure out how, to really rediscover myself. My husband was over there the same person and expecting me to be the same person. I had profoundly changed, maybe not wide ways, but very deep ways. If that makes sense. My heart had grown with each child, thankfully. We always worry about that when we're pregnant with our next kid. I'm going to love this newborn as much. Am I going to love the one who's here as much as I'm going to love this newborn that I have to take care of. And it's a have to, because they don't care for themselves.

Where our other children are more independent than a newborn. I understand that. And it's really hard to form into words, the way that we can feel lost as we're rediscovering ourselves. We go through this several times throughout our life. But for me, I found the most profound to be having a newborn. And just feeling a little bit lost because I wasn't getting enough sleep. It feels we are turned inside out, giving birth to our children. And then we're expected to care for them while we're still recovering. It's just crazy. That's what we're expected to do. But somehow we make it work.

I want to talk to you about the dimensions of wellness, because this was profound for me. I learned about it at the beginning of my undergrad in public health. And then I switched to applied health when that opened up because more of those classes aligned with my interests. The eight wellness, they were originally five. It's based on a theory. It has grown and it just makes so much sense to me because the way it was first introduced was a way of retaining our youth as we become older. And possibly becoming more youthful in certain ways.

The eight dimensions of wellness are psychological, physical, emotional, intellectual, financial, environmental, spiritual, social, and professional. They can be like these roots of a tree. With deep roots and branches that reach for the sky. Each branch is each dimension of wellness, intertwining, and nurturing the others. Embracing this was like discovering a secret, tend to one and you nourish them all. Let one falter and the tree feels it. The tree can sense when it's big arm has been cut off for whatever reason, lightening strikes it whatever .That happened to the tree in our last house before we moved in. We wondered why branches kept falling off when we had snowfalls, or if it was really windy. Huge branches would fall off the tree. The current owners have apparently cut the whole thing down, poor tree. But, when one big branch falls, the other ones are at risk. And it's the same with our wellness.

Let me repeat again, what the dimensions of wellness are for those of you listening. Physical, psychological, emotional, financial, environmental, spiritual, and spiritual does not mean religious for those who aren't religious it's encompasses so much more than religion. Social and professional. Okay. They are not isolated. They are intertwined each one, influencing the other. Every time I took a class. And it talks about the dimensions of wellness. I got super excited. And it was bouncing in my seat and sometimes I chose the classes when reading the description, just because they were going to be talking about wellness. School is my time I was going to dive into it.

 I had a 17 month old when I went back to school and I had to drive to school. I would nurse him, hope that he was going to sleep for the night for my husband, because mommy's milk was going with mommy. I had some frozen in the freezer, so it wasn't that big of a deal, the mom guilt and the worry and all that goes in with that. I would drive about 45 minutes to school for the first year. And I was pregnant with our second child. When I finished and then was able to switch to online. And then I had two more children while I was still in school.

 It was a lot during that time. I'll go back to that and the things that I learned along the way, because I want to share them with you. I think you'll find value in it. But I want to talk about this class that I took called the helping relationship. It was a turning point for me. I was two semesters away from graduating. I was thinking about going for a master's in public health and this class transformed me.

It was tough. It was full of hard truths about what it means to really help someone. This class was about helping somebody who had just gone through a disaster and it taught me that sometimes the best way to heal isn't a fix. I have naturally a big fixer that I am still working on has gotten so much better. I just want to fix things for people. I don't want people to hurt. But the best way to heal isn't to fix, it's support and to empower. Because if people can fix it for themselves, if they come up with the discoveries themselves, It sits so much deeper than somebody else going around and telling you you can fix it by just doing this see problem solve to fix for you.

 Okay, I'll go onto the next person. It doesn't work that way. And it hit me so deep. That's what propelled me towards life coaching. That class, I worked so hard for my grade and I ended up with an A- instead of an A-plus. I could have taken that class three more times.

It was just so powerful for me. I ended up talking to my classmate friend, she was in my first group. We switched groups a couple of times during the semester, to make sure we really got used to other personalities and working with them. Switching around who is having the issue and who is helping all of that. Anyway, I talked to her and I told her that. I felt my calling. I felt it strong and it was to be a life coach, but my problem was, I didn't know enough about life coaching. And I started looking at schools and couldn't find one that really fit for me. And she said, I have a sister whose life coach. Let me put you in contact with her.

Ended up interviewing her on the podcast, Kathe Bates. She's the one who is doing social wellness. She told me about the program she went through and a little bit about what she does, and a few other things. We emailed back and forth. When I researched the school that she went to, I just had that whoa. I'm sure you've all had it where it was just like, this is it. Like all the lights are pointing here, this is where I'm supposed to be. So I joined and it was amazing.

 While I was in there, I decided to focus on mothers. It was towards the end. I was thinking about what I want to do. I want to do it this way. I want to do this way. And it just resonated with me so deeply that I wanted to focus on mothers because we tend to put ourselves last or than last. And We have so much chaos around us when kids are young. Sometimes when they're older. There's so much that goes on around us and we are the ones that are managing it, fixing it for everybody else. We end up taking on other's emotions and everything else. We're super involved in our children's lives sometimes too much.

I've seen moms who have gone on antidepressants or their marriage totally dissolves because they are losing themselves in motherhood. When their children become independent and no longer need them. They don't know what to do with themselves. They aren't used to. Talking to their significant other. They aren't used to, what are their needs? Oh, I have needs. Oh. My health, suddenly I am having health problems because I never took care of myself. This is where the dimensions of wellness come in.

 I really wanted to help out my fellow moms. Especially looking around and talking to them and seeing them, I realized that there were several programs I wanted to put in a place. The first one I put into place, it's called the stay at home mom to dream job, mom. I shortened it to dream job mom when I talk about it. It's for moms who want to go back to work but they don't want to do what they did before they had kids. So they're not sure what they want to do, but they want to do something fulfilling because it's going to take up a big chunk of time, and they're not sure what that fulfilling thing is. They don't know what they like. They don't know. They don't really have hobbies.

I pilot tested the program had so much fun doing it, and I realized during that program that I needed to have like going back to college days, a prerequisite program. And that one is about reclaiming your time because these moms were not setting aside the time to be employee or to start a business. They were expecting themselves and society does, and their significant other was expecting them to do everything they did around the house as a stay-at-home mom while also working. The harder part was they were expecting that of themselves. Reclaim your time was born out of that.

I put in all the pieces that I used when I was in school. I would look around and see the places where things were falling apart in between semesters and sometimes I just had a couple of days. Sometimes I had a week, usually it was a couple of days. I would put together a system for organizing this, or time-blocking this or meal planning and really getting that put into place. What are your favorite meals, have those ones on rotation. Re delegating things within the house, especially as I had more children.

 As I progressed through my degree and had higher level classes that took a lot more mental bandwidth as well as time, I really needed to become clear on what things mattered around the house. What things matter to me, what things matter to our children and make sure that it was more about quality of time than quantity. These are the things that we really spend time on in the reclaim your time program, because we need to have a really good foundation of who's doing what, and when. What things matter, what things may we need to update our traditions, because we're doing things that nobody cares about, but because we're still doing it.

We're in a rut. So it's really about that and reclaim your time. It doesn't mean that you're claiming it for work. Maybe it's for a hobby. Maybe it's just, you have self care. Maybe it's so that you have time to exhale during the day. Those are my programs. And I wanted to talk to you for another minute about a really great worksheet that can give you a little taste of the reclaim your time program.

 It's just a few pages and it is about having a morning routine and an evening routine. Think of it like your bookends. And they are holding up all the books between them. If you have a really good routine for your morning and for your evening you are waking up refreshed, because in your evening you are going to bed on time.

You're thinking about how many hours of sleep you need, not the average. During different seasons of life, you need more. Or if it's, during that time a month, you need more sleep. Really listening to your body, really figuring that out. So you're setting up things in the evening for the morning.

You're setting up the morning for the evening. And if you are having a slower wake up, if you're mindful, if you're having a chance to eat before your kids are climbing all over you demanding things, telling you their favorite shirt isn't washed and giving you the ah and the eye-rolling and everything else, teenagers or my nine-year-old, whatever. If you are taking the time for yourself. Then you have the energy, you have the mental energy, mental bandwidth, as well as the physical energy to do the things that your family needs, the things that you need at work, the things that you need within yourself. And you have that throughout the day. You're setting yourself up for success. You're setting up your evening with setting out your clothes ahead of time.

You're making sure that meals are packed and ready to go. if you can set up things for breakfast, do it, things like that. My worksheet goes through those and that is free. You can find it. On my website. Wellness and every season.com slash free resources. It's the second one down there. Or you can find it in the show notes, which is even easier to find. And let's talk about reclaiming your time together.

Let's work through that together. Let me tell you a little bit about some of the stories that I had from dream job, mom. So I had one who ended up finding a job that absolutely fulfilled her. I had another that I talked to, and this was where I really started the reclaim your time program. She was trying to work within her children's school hours. And she has a PhD.

So it just, it wasn't working for her. And we talked about what her family's expectations are on her and what hers are, and really dove into that and rethought of things because she really wants to work back into academia, but it's hard to when her husband also works in academia and has harder hours. They're both PhDs.

It's really hard when you are, what's called the default parent. Where you are the one the school calls. You are the one where if your significant other doesn't do it or kids, don't do it, it falls on. So I really liked the term default parent, I learned it in Fairplay method and society expects it of us.

 It's really hard for us to have the time and the space and to feel like we can have it without having guilt. Let me tell you right now, try to get rid of the guilt because you are being an example. I think of it this way. You're being an example to your children, you're being an example to your spouse.

You're being an example to society, to your neighbors of what it looks like to have self care. So you can better show up for your family and to help provide for your family. If that's what you want to do and to have things that fulfill you. That you won't get lost in motherhood. That you are a whole, beautiful person. How often have you been away from your family and you feel weird because you are so wrapped up in being a mother? That if people don't see you around your children, That you're like, I don't know who I am away from my children. Let's have you figure out who you are away from your family when you're just by yourself, when you have those few minutes, of peace alone. Let's do that together. And as we part ways, Today I want you to join me in a moment of reflection. What season of motherhood are you in today? What dimensions of your wellness are calling for your attention and nurturing our own branches of wellness?

As we wrap up today, I want to give you 10 coaching questions to help you. Think about where you are at in life, what needs to change? What you're doing really well and feel really empowered by. So here they are. What does a day in your life currently look like? And where do you feel you're losing precious moments that could be spent on your own wellness? Reflecting on your journey.

Can you identify a season of motherhood where you felt most disconnected from your personal identity? How did that impact your daily life? How do you currently balance your personal aspirations with the responsibilities of motherhood and what challenges does this balance present? When you think about your professional life, what does your dream job look like?

And what's holding you back from reaching it. In moments of family chaos. How do you prioritize your wellbeing? And what strategies do you use to maintain your inner balance? Can you walk me through your morning routine? Do you feel it sets a positive tone for your day? Or is there something missing that could make it more empowering? Evenings can be a reflective time.

How do you wind down from the day and is your current routine nurturing or depleting your wellness? When you contemplate the wellness dimensions. Physical, psychological, emotional, financial, environmental, spiritual, social, and professional. Which one do you wish to enhance the most and why? Have you experienced a moment recently where you've thought I need support with this. What kind of coaching or guidance do you feel could help you navigate through this? Lastly, if there were a guide that promise to streamline your mornings and evenings. Creating a space for self care and family connection. How would that change your day to day life?

If any of these questions resonated with you or you found yourself seeking answers? I encourage you to look into the resources I've mentioned today. You can find a guide in the show notes that might just be the first step towards reclaiming your time. And rediscovering your professional dreams.

We provide strength and shelter for those we love. And. I want to tell you, I hold gratitude in my heart for the shared time. Thank you for walking this path with me. For opening your heart to this conversation. May the stories and lessons we share today, be seeds for your own growth in every season to come. Because we have all the seasons within our life and sometimes within a day, Take care, nurture yourself and remember. We are here, walking this walk together.

You are not alone and you are loved by your children, by your significant other, by everyone within your community. And I hope you have a wonderful day and week, and I will see you next week. Bye.

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Outro: 

Thank you for joining us on this week's refreshing wellness discussion. I'm Autumn Carter, your guide through the seasons of motherhood, and I hope you found inspiration and valuable insights during our time together.

If you resonate with the topics we explored today and want to continue your wellness journey, I invite you to follow me on Instagram at Moms Wellness in Every Season. There, you'll discover a wealth of ongoing wellness tips specifically curated for moms like you.

Sharing our podcast with others is an act of caring, and I invite you to spread the word by sharing, subscribing, and leaving a review wherever you enjoy your podcasts. Your support is deeply valuable to us and enables us to reach more mothers who are seeking transformation and empowerment.

If you have a specific topic you'd like us to cover in more detail or if you're interested in a free coaching consultation, don't hesitate to reach out. You can send me a direct message on Instagram or visit my website, wellnessineveryseason.com, to send an email. I'm here to support you on your wellness journey.

Thank you again for being a part of our vibrant community. I'm genuinely excited to connect with you, hear your stories, and continue this important discussion in the weeks to come.

Until next time, remember to prioritize your well-being, embrace every season with grace, and always strive for wellness in every aspect of your motherhood journey. Take care, and I can't wait to catch up with you soon.

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