Making resolutions sustainable

Tiffany Sauder: I am a small-town kid, born with a big-city spirit. I choose to play a lot of awesome roles in life. Mom, wife, entrepreneur, CEO, board member, investor, and mentor. 17 years ago I founded a marketing consultancy, and ever since my husband, JR and I have been building our careers and our family on the exact same timeline.

Yep. That means four kids, three businesses, and two career. All building towards one life we love. When I discovered I could purposefully embrace all of these in my life, it unlocked my world. And I want that for you too. I'm Tiffany Sauder and this is Scared Confident.

We're back. It's the new year. Happy new Year. I hope you and your family. A great holiday season. We started this tradition about seven years ago now, I think, um, where I think we like literally have the best New Year's Eve tradition ever . I felt like it was always a super overrated holiday.

Like there was all this expectation and I wanted to be in this like fancy dress in some big city doing something super grand. and that was what I wanted to do, except there was never any sitters, like nobody wants to babysit on New Year's Eve. And so like seven years ago

We started this tradition with a group of our friends, um, where they come to our house on New Year's Eve, like 6 30, 7 o'clock. We feed all the kids. They pretty much stay in the basement. And then we have a really nice dinner for the adults. There's usually like 10 to 12 of us, and then all of our kids.

So there's like 30 people. Like it's a lot. And then it used to be everybody spent the night at our house. Sometimes not people go and sleep in their own beds, but they come back for breakfast. And then we sit around the table after breakfast and talk about like recap the year before set intention for 23.

We pray together and it is just the most special. So if you are like me and we're on the struggle bus with like, how do you make New Year's Eve fun? Because I just wanna be with people, but also like very sustainable, not expensive, and you don't need a sitter. Um, I'm telling you, this is really fun.

And we have like a journal that I keep in a drawer and every year I get it out only on that day and like record our intentions and we read it and review it and it's really special. So this is like definitely the season of goals and resolutions or pick your word or kinda like pick your poison.

And I'm a little bit feeling like this weird tension of, because I'm an achiever, wanting to be like, oh, my whole life should feel brand new. It's a new year, it's a fresh start. It should be all this new stuff. And being like, Do I need a lot of new things actually in my life or in my time? I don't know If I do, I don't know that I feel like I'm that far off course.

So doesn't mean I'm not still gonna go through the exercise of setting some intention, but if you're like me and not really feeling like you need to rip your life apart and totally re-engineer it, um, I think don't fall for the trap. you don't have to.

Totally rip it apart and do something new. So kinda where I'm at, I've also learned the fourth quarter is crazy planning for my companies with my leadership teams. And then like Thanksgiving to December is just a madness of holiday planning and cooking and wrapping and shopping and parties and clothes and all the stuff I love.

But it's not really a time of quiet reflection. And so that work really happens in the beginning of January, so I'm gonna be working on that. But as I'm feeling my life right now, I don't know that it's a grand reset season for me. I think it's more about really continuing to weave and tension into my time.

Um, but I have a couple of things I wanna share as I've been just chatting with friends and like scanning the landscape as I do for like themes that are playing out. One is that as you're going through the season of setting goals, realize that life cannot be eternally additive, meaning there is an exchange for every choice you make.

Simple example, if you decide, I'm gonna wake up early and I'm gonna exercise five days a week, your exchange is the sleep. , like there is a cost to that. The exchanges, instead of sleeping an hour, I'm gonna work out an hour. Now, you might be willing to make that exchange, but you've got to realize there is indeed a price for every new goal, every commitment that you're paying.

And you have to make sure that as you're adding things into your schedule, as you're adding things to your commitment, as you're adding things that you're promising to yourself and the people around you that you're gonna. How are you gonna sustainably make the space for that to be able to be true? How are you gonna do that?

And I think we don't always think about that side of it. For instance, again, I'll go back to this example of if you're gonna wake up an hour earlier every day so that you can exercise and exchange that hour of sleep, How do you make it so that that's sustainable? Maybe you don't turn the TV on on weekdays so that you can get to bed earlier because you know that that's gonna be an important exchange.

So like you kind of see this domino effect of what are you going to trade for the thing that you want in your life. And I was talking to one of my close friends. She's having this just like amazing moment in her career. She's totally crushing it at work. Her husband is getting some really cool opportunities as well and they're really feeling the tension, not of just being like a couple that both has job, but both of them, like their career opportunities are starting to get really loud and really cool and a little bigger than they both imagined.

And I was texting with her saying, Watch it. Be careful. Not that you don't continue to say yes to all the things you want to in your career, but the thing I see happen is that you don't intentionally decide what you're gonna exchange for this new opportunity. So this is again, just a like a practical example of.

Like laundry takes six to eight hours a week for a family of four kids, a two of like to do the load, fold it, put it away, all the stuff. I mean, it is a significant amount of time. So are you gonna trade laundry, pay somebody to do your laundry so that you can say yes to these opportunities. Or an example in our household, we have a kid that's now in.

travel sports. So that's gonna take us away 50% of our weekends. Well, to say yes to that, what do we need to exchange so that other things are still happening in our lives and we're maintaining our house and our yard, and all that kind of stuff. So these are examples in my space or my friends' world.

Make sure the things that you're saying yes to, you're also saying, how am I gonna make the space for that to be sustainably true? Because as achievers, we can convince ourselves, we can power up to this like super hero status of I have no needs. I'm never hungry. I don't need downtime, I don't need to rest, I don't need relationships.

I can run fast and hard. No problem. You can right up until you can't. And that. Run hard, crash and burn and run hard. Crash and burn is a really exhausting thing to live around. I know this because I am that naturally and I've had to work really hard and it's exhausting for my family when I'm in that mode.

So as you're looking at your commitments for 2023, as you're looking at the things that you wanna add, what are you going to do to make the time for that so that it can be sustainably true? On 50 weeks out of the year, you actually deliver on these things that you're wanting to have happen. It could mean that you need to outsource some stuff.

it could mean that you have to recruit your family to help you in different . Ways. this is where I find capacity, or at least I have over the years, my basic five. If you've been listening for a while, you've heard me talk about these basic five.

These are the five areas that have to be solved every single week no matter what. The first is laundry. If you're a human being, you make laundry. , you have to stay on top of it, or it eats you alive, laundry. The second is your house or your apartment. The place you live takes a level of maintenance, cleaning it, that kind of thing.

The third one is food. You have to eat. How are you gonna solve for food and what you're gonna do? the fourth one is relationships. I put family there could be. Aging parents could be, friendships, but like, how are you gonna keep the relationships intact? And then the last one is yourself. How are you gonna schedule and make sure that you have the time to do the things you need for yourself week in and week out?

So those are my basic five. You have to solve for laundry, you have to sell for your house, you have to solve for relationships, you have to solve for food, and you have to solve for. This is another example I was talking to somebody about today. Food is like a hard soul for them. Every single day before dinner, she and her husband talk on the phone and decide what they're gonna have.

Somebody goes to the grocery store, they buy the stuff, they drive it home. Like that's so much work. and she was saying, I'm, I feel stretched for time. I was like, well, how do you solve that more efficiently? Pick one day that you're gonna do your menu planning, and if that feels heavy for a long time, what I did was Monday was soup day.

Tuesday was tacos Wednesday with sandwiches, and Thursday was leftovers. Like that was predecided. So it was like, what soup am I gonna make or buy tacos? I'll eat anything in a taco shell and so will my family. And so it was like, pick a protein, add some seasoning. Jam some veggies in it and call it dinner.

The third one is sandwiches. Again, paninis are basically tacos. Just throw some protein between two pieces of bread and throw some butter on a griddle. And then I would put like ranch dip and vegetables out. And then Thursday was, we're gonna eat whatever's leftover. That was like dinner for so long. I have the capacity now to be slightly more creative, but I suddenly realized Monday through Friday, it's actually Monday through Thursday, it's like a eat to live situation around here.

Friday, Saturday, Sunday, we can move back into our live to eat dwelling. We love food, we love flavor. I love to cook. But Monday through Thursday, . It was like, I don't want to do fast food. Make it simple. And I like literally predecided categories. If you want it to be pasta instead of sandwiches, great. If you want it to be sushi night instead of sandwiches, great.

But just deciding that category. Literally gave me hours back in the week. So if you wanna work out in the evenings instead of micro planning and micro solving for dinner, that is an easy hack of, I'm gonna do meal planning on Sunday. Have your spouse help you, we're gonna, Instacart all of our groceries so that I have time to work out for 30 minutes, three times a week, whatever it is.

Anyway, How do you make a currency exchange? In the things that you're doing, find efficiency in it so that you can get the things that you want, but you still only get 24 hours a day and you still have a finite amount of capacity. So how do you use your decision making and your good energy towards the things that take you closer to your goals instead of just perpetuating the way that it's always been done?

Because that's the way it's always been done. Okay. So life does not always have to be a fresh start at the beginning of the year, and life cannot be continually additive. There's an exchange for everything that we wanna say yes to. the last thing that I'm reflecting on right now, I was reading back through that journal I was telling you about, that my friends and I have kept, over the last few years, and one of the things I summarized based on something that was going on in someone's life was you cannot heal it.

If you do not feel it or if you haven't given yourself permission to feel it, you cannot heal it. And. If you're in a season where there is relationship that needs to be repaired or there's hard feelings, or you feel distance in a relationship as, someone who has had to learn to let my body and my heart and my, um, emo like, I guess just like actually feel my emotions cuz I can power through and compartmentalize like, Professional athlete, like I'm a professional at that.

Like to really actually let myself feel it and to be honest with myself about what I'm feeling, it was just a reminder to me that feeling, your emotions being present for what your body needs to tell you. If we being honest with yourself about if something hurt you or somebody disappointed you, again, they don't need to fix it necessarily, but letting yourself actually.

Feel it is part of your process of healing, and I'm far from an expert in this area, but it was a reminder to me that my emotions are an important part of me staying present, staying healthy, processing kind of the what life presently is presenting to me so that I can continue to stay present and not build this facade that I'm living behind.

Actually be and actually be present and to be available and to be honest with myself about what hurts and what helps. And, um, I haven't always been good at that. So it was a reminder for me and I thought would share it with each of you. So I always love to hear from you if you're, in. Stage of life where it is about renewal.

I'd love to hear what you're learning. reach out to me and if you're in a stage like me where it's really more about kind of tweaking the dials than it is a total complete stage of renewal, then I hope you'll continue to listen in on the journey and, we'll crush 2023 together.

Thank you for joining me on another episode of Scared Confident. Until next time, keep telling fear. You will not decide what happens in my life. I. . If you wanna get the inside scoop, sign up for my newsletter. We decided to make content for you instead of social media algorithms.

The link is waiting for you in show notes, or you can head over to tiffany soder.com. Thanks for listening.

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