This year, your holiday season will be absolutely amazing! Holidays can be a mix of celebration and stress as moms but fear not, I've got three solid steps for you. We're diving into the importance of sharing your holiday dreams and desires with your family and asking them about theirs. Understanding everyone's expectations is the secret sauce to unforgettable holidays!

Next, keep the holiday spirit alive by ensuring everyone gets to enjoy the festivities they love. Whether it's decorating, cooking up a feast, or cherished traditions, make it happen. I'll also share how to define what success looks like for your family during the holidays because it's different for everyone! Is it quality time, heartwarming memories, or just pure fun? Once you're all on the same page, it's like having a roadmap to holiday happiness. Hit that play button, and let's make your holidays the best ever!

What you'll hear in this episode:

[1:05] Monday Momma Chats with Kelsey.

[2:00] Three steps to ensure the holidays end positively.

[3:55] Decide as a family how to measure success.

[5:45] Communicate your expectations and desires.

CONNECT WITH KELSEY

Follow Kelsey: @thisiskelseysmith

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Learn more at https://thisiskelseysmith.com/

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Kelsey Smith 0:00

You can go in and say, Hey, for the holiday, whether it's tonight or not, what would make it fun for you? What are you looking to achieve? Because often we have these unspoken expectations and desires in life in general, and especially on the holidays, and then someone ends up disappointed, because we didn't know. So this allows everyone to get their hopes and dreams for the day or the celebration out on the table. And then that brings us to the second part. So decide is a feeling what is the most important measures. For that? Welcome to mama has goals, your weekly reminder that you shouldn't have to sacrifice your dreams to take on the role of mom. I'm Kelsey Smith, mom of two boys. Why an entrepreneur who's passionate about helping other moms current and aspiring to reimagine mom life. I'm bringing you the resources, support and relatability to debunk that limiting belief that you may have about your ability to achieve your goals while raising a human. We're covering everything from mom guilt, marriage, relationships, careers, finances, mental health, physical health, you name it, your life doesn't have to fully shift once you become a mom, you can have it all. And we'll show you how.

Kelsey Smith 1:33

Happy Monday, and happy Halloween if you celebrate. And I am so excited to come on this morning with you for our first of our series of live with Kelsey for Monday, Mama chats and coaching. And so each Monday we're going to be coming on at nine pacific time and chatting about various things that are going on that affect mom life and different tips and tricks that I've picked up along the way, or have learned from others to share with you. And because this is a holiday for many I want to talk about as we kick off the holidays, or as you celebrate this evening, what are some things that can make sure that it ends positively, right. Because if you've never been in a situation before where you're like, so excited to celebrate something as a family, but the dynamic of everyone else just like ends up not working that way, there's a couple things that I think can really help that. And so whether it's tonight or you celebrate a different holiday, I want to give you three steps that I really recommend before any celebration that you guys do as a family. First thing is to communicate each other's expectations and desires. So for yourself as mom, or leader of the household. In some ways, maybe you're driving some of the things, maybe not either way you want to communicate what are your expectations and desires, ask others what they want as well. So let's say some people want to watch a movie to celebrate the holiday, or they want to go out trick or treating for holding specifically or they don't they want to hang out with specific friends, they have a specific food item, they want to celebrate the holiday with any of those things. Do you want a family photo? Do you want someone else to take pictures? That's such a common theme, right? So think about how you can communicate what you are? And how can that be communicated to everyone else in every level. So this takes either just sitting down for quick five minutes as a family, you can ask everyone separately, and then you can collaborate all together. But you can go in and say, Hey, for the holiday, whether it's tonight or not, what would make it fun for you? What are your expectations, and desires? What are you looking to achieve? Because often we have these unspoken expectations and desires in life in general, and especially on the holidays, and then someone ends up disappointed because we didn't know. So this allows everyone to get their hopes and dreams for the day or the celebration out on the table. And then that brings us to the second part. So decide as a family what is the most important way measures success as a whole family for that celebration or that holiday? So let's say someone's like, well, I want to watch this movie. And I want to go out with friends and do this. And the third person's like, I want to eat this food item. This is really important to me. Well, if you're trying to navigate all of those, you can either measure success by, okay, we're gonna hit check all three of those boxes, we might be able to make that work. Or you can measure success by saying, okay, so it would feel good. If everyone got time within this 48 hours with the friend they want to see. We had this meal as a family and we had X number of hours or minutes as a family only. Right? Then everyone's clear on how you're celebrating the celebration or the holiday and what that looks like so then you're able to measure success that way. And then nobody really gets upset. Because they're very clear on how we're celebrating. And you can even do this with littles, like really little kids, you can come and say, Hey, what would be fun for you tonight? And if they're like, I want to do that tonight could be totally unrelated to the holiday because they don't know who did that. Okay, great. Here are the other things we're gonna do. Okay, can we agree on that. And really, I would say two and a half and older, you can have a version of a conversation like this. And then the third thing is the follow up. So the next day, after all the holiday motions have kind of settled, you hopefully, were able to hit like an 80% success rate on everybody's hopes and dreams and desires for the holiday and the celebration, you want to circle back and ask everyone, what was their favorite part of the celebration or the day? What did they really enjoy? Because sometimes we ask for things that we don't actually want. They're not the most important thing to us. So someone may have said, well, having this meal is most important to me. But then when you ask them their favorite thing, they might not even mention that even if you did it. So then you're able to take note like, that's interesting, everyone really liked this part, even though they didn't even ask for not originally, then for the next holiday, or the next celebration, you can really set everyone up for success by knowing even if they say something else, what they really enjoyed last time, right? And you want to keep this positive. So if the kids come at you with maybe some learnings, or if you as parent had some learnings, then you want to keep that at the parent level. But then on the next celebration, or the holiday that comes around, you can resurface that and say, Hey, here's some things I noticed last time that we did this. And these are some of the expectations I want to set so that we can do better this, right. So it just allows you to have like open conversation with your family. Talk about what people want to get out of any celebration or holiday. And it could be birthdays, anything else have to do this with your spouse for like anniversaries. Valentine's Day, I hear a lot that people are like, I don't want to have to ask for it. Well, if you get in the habit of kind of communicating like, hey, it's important for me to have gifts, or it's important for us to have alone time together, whatever those things are, then you can all be on the same page and make sure that it feels good for everybody. So I want to recap that. If you're just tuning in celebrations of holidays, events, they can end up a little bit stressful, and sometimes people can get disappointed. So to make that a little bit easier, there's three steps that I recommend. The first one is making sure you communicate your expectations and desires as a whole as a family and ask others for theirs to decide as a family what is most important and the number one goal measure for that celebration or holiday. How would everyone be so excited and on agreement that it was a fun evening? And three, follow up the next day and ask Hey, what was your favorite part? What made you so happy about this, and then you keep things positive. Everyone has a line of communication and you can make sure you're doing everything that you want to do for that event. So I wish you the best of luck. But just a couple of quick moments to get your brain moving and hopefully help you enjoy the week especially Today is Halloween. So if you celebrate that, hopefully this helps your feeling as well. Thank you so much love. See you soon. Mom in your life that you see and love her by sharing this episode. Giving while your cup is overflowing always pays itself back tenfold when you need it most.