How to Stay In Touch With Your Personal Goals as a New Mom
There are two philosophies to this:
a) spending a little time on every little thing you want,
or
b) choosing one thing to focus on at a time, spending all of the little moment on that one goal/hobby.
(TL;DR - Try hard to focus on one thing to its completion. When you have limited time, spreading it even thinner won’t get you closer to your goals.)
As someone with a myriad of hobbies, dreams, and goals, my modus operandi up until now has been to indulge in all of my interests all at once. Even now I am in the middle of reading 6 books at the same time.
My projects are the same way. Right now, I have acrylic paintings, a budding linocut business, several sewing projects, a web development project, aspirations for 6-pack abs, an interest in creating a family meal plan, shed plans, foreign language learning books, and an unruly vegetable garden all vieing for my time and attention.
All of that on top of raising my infant son and keeping the home. I am grateful that I don’t need to work a job and care for the baby. Maybe it’s because of that privilege that I am only now figuring this out.
I have been driving myself (and my husband) crazy trying to fit some time into my week for all of my goals, but I am learning to slim them down. A lot. As a new mom, sometimes it can feel like you are giving up on your dreams or losing a part of yourself in the wake of shifting your life around raising a family. And maybe this is the case. BUT!
Instead of spreading your energy around all of your interests, you can focus on ONE goal at a time, follow that goal to completion, and then move to the next one. Do this instead of spreading yourself thin, and you can avoid the stress of looking around and seeing only half-baked efforts and discarded, half-eaten dreams.
This all clicked for me while reading “Fluent in Three Months” where the author described how he and his friends are able to learn so many languages. (I am doing pretty well with German and Spanish!) They focus on one language at a time, one goal at a time.
I am going to try my best at applying this method. Updates will follow.