5 Questions to Set Priorities for a New Season of Life as a Military Spouse

[00:00:00] Christine: Hello friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Milspouse Mastermind Show. I am so excited to be back with you today. I know it may feel like it hasn’t been that long, but for me, I prerecorded so many of these episodes before the summer because I knew I needed that time and that space to be present with my kids, and we had a lot of other things going on that were on my plate.

[00:00:25] Even though we were not PCSing this summer and I knew I needed the space to step back from the podcast. So if you have been in our community for a while, you probably have seen that I haven’t been as present. I. Our Facebook community. I haven’t been actually showing up and promoting the episodes as much this summer because I wanted to continue to give out valuable content to you all summer long, but I needed that time and that space to focus on what was going on around me.

[00:01:00] So it is fun to be back to recording an episode for you in almost real time. It has been quite the summer, and I can’t wait to unpack that with you over the next couple of weeks together. Talk about some of the biggest things that I have learned over the course of this summer. But today I felt like it was important for us to do a quick episode as we are looking toward a new season.

[00:01:26] My kids are all going back to school this week, and I know it is a time when a lot of kids are going back to school, and I felt like this was a good time for us to have a quick episode where we talk about looking ahead to our schedule for the fall and really learning to set boundaries and how we can prioritize the things that matter most to us.

[00:01:52] I think this is. Such a valuable exercise for all of us regardless of where you find yourself. If you are someone who has had your kids home all summer and you are so excited about having a little more space when they go back to school so you can get more things done, if you have littles at home, you don’t even have kids in school yet, um, maybe you have someone going to Mother’s Day out for the first time, and that’s going to be a shift for you.

[00:02:21] Maybe you work. Full-time. Your kids are, have all been in summer camps and you, you’re not sure that anything is going to change or maybe you don’t even have kids at all. What we’re gonna talk about today, absolutely. Applies to all of us. We are going to discuss five questions to ask ourselves as we are setting intentions for a new season.

[00:02:45] Because whether you have kids or not, regardless of what ages your kids are, I have found that so many activities, so many volunteer opportunities, so many church commitments and community groups and all of these things are very seasonal and so, so many. Organizations will take a break over the summer months, and then they get back into their normal rhythm over the fall and winter spring months.

[00:03:14] And so this is the perfect time for all of us to start thinking about how we want our schedule to be, what we want to prioritize, and what we are going to say yes to, and what we are going to say no to. In the coming months.

The Importance of Setting Intentions

Okay, so let’s talk about what these five questions are that we can ask as we are looking into how we want to prioritize our time in a new season. And I say that this is important for all of us, for you and for me because I haven’t had that time to reflect and set my own intentions for this fall, it is something that is on my list to do this week as soon as the kids are back in school, and I can carve out some time because I knew I wanted to focus my summer on our family and stuff that we had going on. With our family and the things that needed to be taken care of outside of the podcast, and now I’m ready to shift my efforts to shift my focus and be able to prioritize things in a new way for a new season.

[00:06:40] And so I’m going to be walking through this exercise. Myself this week. So know that this is not something that’s just theoretical. It is something that I am actually doing in my own life, and I hope it will help you in yours. So as we look to a new season of life and we look to what’s coming up, there are going to be.

A Balancing Act

[00:07:04] So many opportunities that come your way. I have yet to go through a big season of life, maybe with the exception of the pandemic, but without there being opportunities for how you’re going to spend your time. I think very few of us struggle with. Unlimited amounts of time on our hands. Most of us have many opportunities, whether your kids are older and you have more time for a job, you have more time for volunteer work, or your kids are little and they need your time and attention.

Boundaries Matter

[00:07:37] All of us have demands on our time. We have opportunities for ways for us to spend our time, and really it comes down to what is going to be most important and how do we learn to sell healthy boundaries so that we don’t give away all of our time to the needs of everyone around us, and we fail to care for ourself and really fail to.

[00:08:06] Prioritize the things that we really want to happen in the coming months. It is so easy for the demands, the needs, the wants of everything around us to take up all of our time and our efforts and energy. And then we find ourselves in the place where we feel drained, where we feel like we have nothing left to give because we are pouring from an empty cup.

[00:08:29] It is so common. So if you were raising your hand and saying, yes, this is me, you are absolutely not alone. But this is where we began to change. When we take the time, we carve out the hour, the two hours to say, what do I really want to say? I’m going to pause everything that is going on around me so I can begin to think about what I really want to prioritize, what I want to say yes and to say no to in the coming months.

Discovering Clarity: Five Questions to Help Determine Your Priorities

1. Assess Your Current Commitments

So here are the five questions to help us reflect and set our intentions and our priorities for the coming months. Number one. Make a list of what is currently on your plate, and sometimes this involves looking at a detailed schedule of your week because there are so many things that we might not even think about, but they really do take up a large portion of our time and so it, that is the part that looks different for each of us.

[00:09:39] It’s going to. Depend on what our current commitments are, whether we have kids, the ages of our kids, the activities that our kids are involved in, and what is going on in our life. So we have to look at, start from the place of honestly assessing what is currently on our plate. And once we have it, a good idea of what is actually going on in a given week, what we are actually committed to right now.

2. Figure out What Brings You Joy and Fulfillment

[00:10:11] The second question is a little bit of a curve ball because we’re gonna stop thinking about what is on our plates and we’re gonna pivot to begin to think about ourselves. Because we are the best version of ourselves when we are not completely depleted. When we are not burned out. When we are not exhausted and overwhelmed and pouring from an empty cup.

[00:10:39] So the second question that you and I must ask ourselves is, what is it that brings me joy? And this gets to the heart of what it means to live filled, fueled, and full of joy. Asking ourselves what brings us joy is actually a question of what we need to fill our cup. It’s about becoming aware of what leaves us feeling refreshed and refueled, and what leaves us feeling drained.

[00:11:17] This is a question I ask myself on almost a weekly basis because I am always looking for what is it that is actually helping me have more margin in my life? What is helping me be a better spouse, a better parent? What is it that is giving me life? What is it that I can truly be? Thankful for in this moment, and how can I tap more into that?

[00:11:47] It’s not the big things, it’s the little actions, the little things that we do in a day that refresh and refuel us. Those are the things that bring us joy and that we want to cultivate more of in our own life. I noticed this summer when I changed my morning routine and I was not spending the time that I usually do on my mindset, on my mental and emotional health, that that had a significant negative effect on how I was showing up in my day, on how I felt on a daily basis.

[00:12:28] And so shifting that morning routine back to the things that I know that. Really make a difference that really improve my mental and emotional health and wellbeing and saying these are the things that are going to help me show up as the wife. I wanna be as the mom that I wanna be. These things are helping me live filled, fueled, and full of joy.

[00:12:54] For me, because we currently live in, in a place that has a, an amazing temperature year round, if I will take five minutes to go lay on the hammock, and I cannot tell you how many times this does not happen, even though this is something simple, a practice that can take five minutes. If I will go lay on the hammock for five minutes, that makes a huge difference in my day.

[00:13:21] That is something that brings me joy. Taking even a 10 minute walk in the morning, that is something that helps me show up as the best version of myself. That is something that brings me joy. So it’s noticing. What are these little things during my day that I can do that bring me joy, that help me show up as the best, most alive version of myself?  What is it that brings me life, and what is it that drains me and how can I do more of the things that truly bring me life?

3. Chart Your Growth Path

The third big question that we want to ask ourselves. Is, how do I want to grow in this next season? And for me, how do you want to grow? That’s a big question. For me, it really boils down to three main areas: looking at

• • who I am becoming
  • The skills that I want to learn
  • the goals that I am working towards.

We’ve talked a lot in past episodes about setting goals for your life as a whole, looking far out, 10 years into the future, and then narrowing. That down into seasonal goals and monthly goals and weekly goals, and how we break this down into bite size steps of action that we can take.

[00:14:47] We’ve talked about how we assess where we are in life and really look at how we want to grow. Through the lens of who we want to become and how we want to show up in our daily life. So if you have missed those episodes, I recommend going back through the archives and looking at some of these episodes on goal setting and really assessing our lives and setting growth goals for the future.

[00:15:18] If you need some help getting started, I recommend going to milspouse mastermind.com/growth wheel, and that is a free assessment to help you assess where you are in each area of your life and how to set growth goals for the future. I. But the big question for number three is how do I want to grow in this season?

4. Choose Your Seasonal Goals

[00:15:40] And then once we figure out what are the things that are fueling and filling us with life, how do we want to grow in this season? And what do I currently have on my plate? Then it’s a matter of saying, what do I want to prioritize in this next season? Because we can’t do all the things, and it’s a matter of saying, okay, what things are the non-negotiables?

[00:16:04] What do I want to prioritize in this season? And, and really having an honest conversation about what those priorities need to be. And then the fifth question that we each ask ourselves is, what needs to change? Because if you are looking ahead, you are seeing all of the opportunities, all of the ways that you want to grow, all of the things that you want to do more of that bring you life, and you have.

5. Recognize What Needs to Change

[00:16:33] So many different obligations that are taking up all of your time, then maybe it’s time to have an assessment and say, okay, something needs to change. What needs to change about my schedule? What am I going to say yes to, and what am I going to say? No to, because if you wait till you are in the moment and somebody is asking you, can you commit to this thing?

[00:16:56] If you don’t know what you are saying yes to, you’re going to say yes to what other people value, what other people want you to do, instead of saying, these are the things that are most important to me and to our family for the season, and these are the things that we already are committed to. And so, We just can’t say yes at this time because that is how we go about setting those healthy boundaries for ourselves.

Turning Answers into Action

[00:17:25] We know what we are saying yes to so that we can know that we need to say no to everything else. So what do I do once I ask myself these questions? Once I sit with these questions and come up with the answers, what do I want to prioritize in the season? What needs to change? For me, it’s really going back to pen and paper and sketching out what my schedule is going to look like.

[00:17:55] How am I going to. Time block everything in and fit it into a week. Is this actually doable? A couple of months ago, I did an episode specifically about setting a schedule, and I will link that below in the show notes. So if you need some help figuring out your time blocks, figuring out your schedule, that is the episode to go listen to.

[00:18:19] I hope that this gives you a practical framework for figuring out what you want to prioritize, what the most important things are to you and to your family in the coming months. So that you can live with more joy so that you can show up as the best version of yourself so that you can actually do the things that matter to you.

[00:18:45] All right, friends. Thank you for joining me for this episode. Until next time, may you live filled, fueled and full of joy.