Before you jump into back-to-school schedules, rules, and to-do lists, I want you to set your goals and intentions for this school year. Because focusing on your mindset is what actually determines how this year will feel and how it all will go.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• The back-to-school step you might be missing that makes a huge difference in how your year goes
• Why mindset needs to come before logistics
• Examples of thoughts you can use to feel the way you want to feel
• The types of goals every family should set at the start of a new year

If you don't decide on purpose how you want this school year to feel, the year will just happen to you. Instead of steering the ship, you’ll be reacting. But taking this 20 minutes with me to get clear on what you actually want will pay off all year long.

Read the full show notes here.

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Hey, welcome back to Become a Calm Mama. I'm your host. I'm Darlynn

Childress. I'm a life and parenting coach, and it's that time of year again.

There's new backpacks, new teachers, new routines, and I wanna do

something with you today before we get into any of the logistics of

the new school year. I want to help you set an

intention for the school year because most of

us jump straight into schedules. Mm-hmm. and rules and

to-do lists, and we skip the part that actually

determines how the year feels and

how it goes for us. So today's episode is all

about setting your family's intention for this school

year, starting with your mindset and your goals before

you start with all the logistics. Now, this can be kind of

hard because once we get to the end of the summer and the school

year starts, A lot of us are really tired. We just came off of a

summer that required a lot of camps to

coordinate, kids to entertain, our own work to keep up

with. And now here we go right into a whole new set of demands,

right? Homework, activities, carpools, forms to

sign. And it's tempting to just put your head down and

get through it. But I want you to know, if you don't

decide on purpose how you want this school year to

feel, The year will just happen to you, and the years go by

really fast, and you're gonna end up reacting the whole time instead

of sort of steering the ship for yourself. And I don't think

that that's actually less effort. It actually

feels harder when you don't have power or

intention over your life. Reacting is more

exhausting than spending 20 minutes now with

me getting clear about what you actually want. Yeah.

So that's the invitation today. A little bit of upfront thinking

that's going to pay all year long as you go through this

year. So what am I even talking about, right? I'm talking about

mindset. I'm talking about intention. And how I

think about intention as a life coach working with

parents, right, is I think about chasing

feelings. I want to start with how you want to feel

this school year instead of how, what you want like to

do. I want you to be able to pick a

couple of emotions that help, will help

define you this year and define your family and what you want your

whole emotional experience to be in your family. When you

do that, when you create an intention for how you want to

feel about an experience before the experience even

starts, You get to actually chase that feeling. Most of

us go into a new school year reactively, right? We just respond to whatever

comes at us day by day. But if you take a few minutes now to

decide how you actually want to feel this year, you'll have something

to come back to when things get hard. It's like a

compass, basically. So here's the exercise.

It's really simple. What are the top 3 emotions you want to have during

this school year? Now, what— not what you think you're supposed to

feel, what you actually want more of. So common

ones that moms pick, like they wanna feel more calm, they wanna feel more

connected, they wanna feel more confident, they

wanna have more peace or ease, they wanna have

more gratitude, they wanna feel more content, they

wanna have more clarity. So there's no right answer. It's

just about thinking about what do you wanna create more of in your family this

year? Yeah. For yourself. Maybe you want more joy. Maybe

you want more fun. Maybe you want more ease. And I've talked about

this when I talk about summer mindset. I've talked about this about winter

break mindset. But this time we're talking about it when it

comes to school mindset, the school year. How do you

want it to feel in your family? What are you chasing?

I was thinking about this when I was writing this episode. about how

I want to feel this year, and my kids are going to college. They're in

college, and so the end of this summer will happen in a couple weeks.

Actually, it happens as this episode comes out. And how do

I want to feel while I know my kids are at school? I want to

feel productive this year, and I want to feel

more free, actually. So I want to have more freedom, and I want to have

more productivity, but that's because my kids are older. Yeah. When they were younger, I

wanted to have calm, always calm, calm, calm. For years, I was

just chasing that, right? That's why this podcast is called Become a Calm

Mama, because I have been chasing calm for

like the whole time I raised kids basically, and learning more and more how to

create that. So that's what I want for you to figure out is what do

you want more of this year? And then also the cool thing is that you

can ask your kids the same question. Ask them, what do you wanna feel

this year? You might be surprised by their answers and it might

give you sort of clarity about how you wanna guide them or coach them this

year. And when things start to go sideways, you can check in with each other.

And so you can say like, how's it going? You know, are you feeling more

confident? Like you said you wanted to be more confident and you know, how's

that going? Or if they're struggling with something and they said they wanted to build

more confidence, you can talk about it. You can say, this is what confidence looks

like. It looks like overcoming hard moments and

building belief in yourself that you can manage it and handle it. So this

homework assignment that you are struggling with, or this project, or this new

coach, or this new whatever, if you wanna feel confident,

we have to struggle and get through to the other side. And that's where the

confidence is. It's on the other side of this, you know, this handout that you're

trying to do. So it's really helpful information to find out what your kids

are chasing and what feelings they wanna feel. And it also just gives

them the concept that you get to feel on purpose, like you

get to be intentional about your feelings. And

how that works is your thoughts create your feelings. So

if I want to feel more free in my life, I need to

be thinking thoughts like, I get to do what I

want. I have a lot of free time right now, and

that's great, and I'm enjoying this. And I love this

instead of feeling a little bit depressed or sad or

meaningless or purposeless because I don't know what to do with my kids being at

school, at college, right? So for you, I want you to believe

that peace is possible. Calm is inevitable. Calm

starts with me. Whatever thoughts that you need to think will help you

chase the feelings that you want to feel. So,

okay, now I want to talk of a little bit about goals, and I

want us to think about goals in these 3 areas of our

lives. So you have your feelings sorted, and now we're going to think

about these 3 categories because we— of course your

kids have academic goals, but you as a parent, as a family,

you have your home that you want to manage, right? You have your,

your job, your work-life balance, your chores, how they're

divided, quality family time. Mm-hmm. Balancing screen

time, getting enough sleep, getting enough movement,

right? So you have kind of like how you want the house to feel or

how you want your home life to be like. So if that means

improved connection or better hygiene routines or better

sleep habits, I want you to think about 1 or 2

things in your life at home that you would

like to change. So pick something that matters

to you that Maybe think about last year that you didn't like, or that you

just wished you had more of. And if it's like dialing in

sleep, dial in sleep. If it's dialing diet, say, I wanna

dial in diet. If it's dialing in your own self-care and like creating more

work-life balance or home balance, then say, okay,

that's what I want. I wanna create more time for myself. I wanna

create more equity in my partnership with the

person I co-parent with. Whether that's your partner, your spouse,

whoever it is, deciding, yes, I wanna change the way

that we structure our family life, and I wanna give that

person more responsibility. So I want you to think about a goal in your

personal, like, home life and that you wanna prioritize.

Then I want you to think about an academic goal for your kids,

right? So in general, it, it can be hard

to figure out What our kids need to work on, right? But

because they feel like they have to work on everything. Yeah. So

I'd love for you to think about it like over the course of the next

several years, you want your kids to learn a bunch of academic skills,

and that could be math, reading, writing, or it could be time management,

motivation, personal responsibility, just kind of general work

habits, study habits. There's a lot of different academic

goals. Yeah. So I'd love for you to think about one or two things that

you wanna have each kid work on and kind of

narrate it, like dial it in, you know, decide what it

is that you see a gap and you wanna work on that this year or

this quarter or whatever it is. It could be organization, concentration.

So again, not all of it, what's actually relevant for your kid this year,

what do they need to work on? And then I want you to think about

social-emotional goals. So do you want your kid to build

self-awareness, like recognizing their emotion,

self-management, expressing their emotion in ways that work,

social awareness, maintaining and building relationships,

self-agency, setting, pursuing goals, resiliency,

bouncing back from setbacks? So thinking about these

different areas that you want your kid to grow in.

So I'll go back and just kind of Say what those are because I think

it'll be helpful to you to kind of know what I just said, right?

Okay. So self-awareness

is one. That means like they recognize their

emotion. Self-management, express that emotion

in ways that work. Social awareness, just building and

maintaining relationships and knowing what's going on in the world.

And then self-agency, Being able to set and

pursue their own goals and like manage themselves, especially as they get into

middle school. We want them to feel like they have power over their lives and

they can set goals and work towards those goals. And then of course,

resiliency is so important, being able to bounce back

from setbacks. So thinking about your kid and your family

in these 3 buckets, right? Where you have your home life, kind of like how

it's run. And if you feel like screens were over the top

last year, fix that. Sleep was out of bounds, fix that. Yeah.

Uh, diet, fix that. Now, if you felt all 3 of those were terrible,

then just pick one. If you felt like you were doing all the

invisible labor and mental load and all of that, and you wanna share that with

your partner, talk about that. That's gonna take time to

transfer some of that responsibility to your partner. So giving

yourself a goal in an area for the

next 3 months will help you feel less overwhelmed by your

family. So a home goal, an academic goal,

and then a social and emotional goal. These are kind of like the buckets that

you're working with as a family. So picking your priorities

across these buckets for the first few months of school, and then same with the

feelings. Like we said, we ask our kids what their feelings are that they

want to chase. I want you to also ask your kids what they want to

focus on. What's one thing around the house you'd like to improve?

What's one thing in your academics you'd like to improve? What's one

thing socially or emotionally you want to improve? You can just

ask them that. They're going, what's social and emotional? And then you can give them

examples like managing your feelings or managing your friendships, things like that.

So again, you might be surprised. It's so interesting to ask your kids these

questions to find out what they want to work on. And what a

gift as a 9-year-old to be asked, what do you want to

work on? Right? What is it that you are interested in learning about

or growing? So let me give you some

down-to-earth practical examples, concrete examples,

because picking your goals can feel kind of abstract until you see it in

action. Okay? So say you've got a family where

mornings have been chaotic and everyone's frazzled by 7:45,

and your home goal this year might be peace and harmony, specifically around

mornings. Your academic goal might be really simple, like

homework gets started before dinner, not after. And then your social-emotional

goal for your kid might be resiliency, because you noticed last year that they fell

apart at the first sight of a hard math program— math problem.

Or say you've got a family with a strong-willed middle schooler

navigating new friend dynamics. So your home goal

might be improved connection, carving out even 15 minutes a

day of real conversation. Your academic goal might be

organization, because backpacks and planners have been a disaster.

And then your social-emotional goal might be self-management, helping them

find better ways to express frustration than shutting down or snapping.

So notice that neither of these examples has 10 goals, just a handful,

like one from each bucket, specific enough that you'd

actually know if you were making progress. We have one family

working on improved connection or

organization or social-emotional

Self-management. So I want you to think about your own family

and deciding kind of in these areas, what is one or two

things that you wanna work on? Again, this isn't to like add homework

to your list of things to do because I know you already have a

lot going on. But what I think happens to us as women

and as moms is that we have so many

goals that we get overwhelmed and there's like, everything feels like

it's a mess and a disaster and we need to fix everything, especially the beginning

of the school year. Yeah. school year, and I

don't want you to get stuck in that trap. I don't want you to get

stuck in that overwhelm trap. This is the way to prevent that overwhelm

by taking back some agency within yourself and deciding,

okay, I know there's stuff to work on in my family. We're going to work

on this in our home life, this in academics, and this

in social-emotional. And we're going to check in 3 months from now and see where

we're at. All the while chasing that feeling of joy, or all the

while chasing that feeling of calm. Or that feeling of purpose or

gratitude or whatever it is, the feeling. So I want you to really

kind of be specific in order to feel

less overwhelmed. That's actually my goal is

always to help you feel less overwhelmed, not more. So I'm not trying to make

like another thing you have to do as a parent. You're already doing this

in your mind, but it's vague and it's hard to catch and there's too much

going on. So we're kind of Being specific in order to feel

more, to have more power, to feel more

empowered. Now, of course, your goals are going to

collide with reality. So here's something I want you to know.

There's going to be days when you can't satisfy what the teacher

or the school wants from your kid while also honoring the

rhythm that works for your family. So your goals and the

school's goals might genuinely be in conflict.

That's okay. That's normal. In those moments,

it's not about trying to do everything. It's prioritizing. When you're

overwhelmed, when there's too much on the list and your kid is in the middle

of big feelings, pause. Come back to your goals

another time. Give yourself permission to focus on just one thing today,

not all 3 priorities, not everything on the list, just the one

thing that matters most right now, which Here's an example. It's 7:00

PM, homework isn't done, your kid is exhausted and starting to

unravel, bedtime is approaching. The school's goal

is homework completion, but your goal tonight

might be connection and sleep. You're allowed to decide

that tonight sleep wins over finishing this worksheet.

That's not you failing the school's expectations, that's

you prioritizing on purpose, Based on what you decided

mattered back when you were thinking clearly. So I really

want you to feel like you have a lot of permission and power over

your life and prioritizing what is the

right thing for your family at a certain time. So one last thing,

this isn't a one-time exercise that you do in August and then forget. Like,

there's a value in naming your feelings and goals, and the value is

that you can actually come back to them in October. In

January when things feel off track, like write these down, these

small little lists of like feelings I'm chasing this year, 3

priorities or 3 goals. Then you can come back to it and be like, huh,

how'd I do on that? How are we doing? Do I want to reset those?

Or like, did we master that? Like, should I pick new ones? So when you're

feeling off track, you can just ask yourself, am I closer to feeling

the way that I said I wanted to feel? Are we making progress? Or

has something shifted? Is it something that I need to revise?

Maybe you said, I really want to be organized this year, and then you

worked really hard at it for a couple of weeks and you realize, I actually

don't care. I don't— it's too much work for me. I don't— it doesn't

bother me if the house is messy. Well, that's fine. Then let it be messy.

So you get to decide. Maybe you thought you needed to focus on

connection, but it turns out that you guys wanted to pro— Yeah.

like focus on social life and being more out and

about and being with friends more than being with the family unit.

Maybe you want to focus on connection in the winter when the weather changes.

So the point isn't to like lock yourself in, it's just to

become self-aware and be intentional with your family.

So this is all about having something concrete to check in

and knowing where you're going as a family and

whether you're making the progress that you want. Again,

you do not need to take it that seriously, but I do think it's useful

to jot down a couple of goals so that you don't feel so

overwhelmed when your family is, you know, going

cuckoo pants. Okay? All right, so here's the

recap. Before you build your routines this

year, I want you to take a few minutes to name How you actually want

to feel. So deciding how you want to feel and asking your

kids, how do they want to feel? And then getting clear on a handful of

goals across home, academics, and social-emotional growth.

Again, for both you and your kids, ask them. And then when the priorities

collide, which they will, give yourself permission to

focus on just one thing instead of trying to do it all.

And then coming back to this intention throughout the year, As a living

compass, like, am I doing what I thought I was going to be doing? Am

I living the way that I wanted to live? If not, no problem.

Then you can, you know, reset, go back to your intention or

change it. So I'd love to invite you to

do this with your kids, just like over ice cream or in the car, or

like, you know, while you're sitting outside in the sun, enjoying the last little

bits of the sun for the summer, you know, asking them, how do you want

to feel this year? What's your goal? What do you want to work on? Yeah.

And even little kids, like 4-year-olds, you could ask them. They don't really know,

but it would make it funny to have a funny conversation with them. Like, what's

a goal? Um, and you can talk about it a little bit.

So especially as they get older, this is a really good conversation to have with

middle schoolers, even though they'll be like, oh, I don't care, stupid, doesn't matter.

Um, they may enjoy it, or their English teacher might be asking

them this question too. So you can kind of give them a little

prod so that they can, you know, answer these questions

in themselves before they get to school.

All right. I hope you like this concept. I'm so

curious to find out if you guys are like, like this kind of

mindset work or if it's annoying to you. I think it's really

helpful when I do spend time

being intentional and thinking about my goals. Yeah. I do feel

better about myself and my family and like where we're going. I feel

less overwhelmed. I feel less frustrated. Um,

so it is, it is useful. And I don't know if

you like it or not, but I did want to do an episode on this

topic so that you could get that support you need and have

that confidence going into the school year that you don't

need to approach it as like an all-or-nothing situation,

that you get to pick what you want to work on, how you want to

feel, and take it at your own pace as a

family and be intentional about yourself

and your kids and your family. So I hope it helps you have

a great intentional start of the school year. And then the next

few weeks, we're going to talk about the practical stuff like mornings and

screens and sleep and all of those routines and

handling meltdowns. And things like that. So I think you're really gonna

enjoy the next few weeks cuz I'm gonna get into a lot of practical, um,

really important things to help you manage your life in ways that are

like useful. So this was your intentional mindset

episode, and then we'll get into all of the details next time.

So I hope you have a great week and I will talk to you next

time.