Have you ever felt like you were just a “crappy mom”?

Chances are if you are a mom in any capacity, you’ve felt this at one time or another.

I used to be a “crappy mom,” too! In the first 2 years of my business I was consumed with my work, uninterruptible, and ALWAYS on edge. (Like, I continued to wake up on the wrong side of the bed like, every. single. day.)

If you know that feeling, I’m sure you know it well. In the light of positivity, we aren’t going to dwell on that today. The purpose is this:

You wanna know how I stopped being a crappy mom? It started with me refusing to continue to tell myself that I was, in fact, a crappy mom.

If you’re anything like me, you expect nothing less than the best from yourself. Grace is something you struggle to offer. But listen, everyone is entitled to bad days – even bad seasons – but the one thing that will set change in motion is the way you see yourself, starting from the way you think.

What you tell yourself in your head is what will manifest in your life so switching that dialogue right now is the first thing that you MUST do to change the course of your life.

After I started to shift the way I thought about myself and the way life around me worked, everything else just started happening for me.

The second greatest contributor to un-crapping my approach to motherhood was creating a morning routine that got me out of bed and set up for the day before my kids wake up (most days!). I say “most days” because my oldest can smell my existence 10 miles away and knows when my blood is flowing before the coffee even hits my soul in the morning – can you relate??

I know you’re rolling your eyes. I KNOW you’re not a morning person. I know sleeping as long as your kids will let you is the greatest gift that staying at home with them gives you. (Besides spending every waking moment with them – of course!)

Freedom is the currency that is more precious than gold in your world and waking up at the crack of dawn would LITERALLY ruin everything, right?

Yeah, I get that.

But you only feel this way because you don’t know the real freedom that lies in empowering yourself to reach your full potential. The freedom you think you’re feeling right now by skipping the alarm and opting for the children bouncing on your head and literally dragging you out from under the covers each morning is slavery in disguise.

Do you *really* feel on top of the world when you are rolling out of bed after your toddler?

I used to tell myself that I did. I would say that sleeping in later was a form of self-care and that I was treating myself, where I otherwise wouldn’t, for all the hard work I do every day. I would stay up until the wee hours of the morning, grinding away at whatever I was currently working on – and I would sleep in like a teenager playing hookie from school.

The reality? I was pacifying my anxiety, feeding my depression, and delaying the inevitable start to my day – further confirming that simple existence was not my favorite thing to do.  

I was starting my day already 10 steps behind. By the time I was ready for productivity, it was already naptime. In short, I was setting myself up for failure – for a crappy approach to motherhood – and I want to rescue you from that.

It’s true that I never thought I would be speaking these words. I actually was hell-bent on finding a way to exert more work in the late night to substitute having to wake up before the sun. I thought surely with 24 hours in the day, they were all made equal and are suited just the same for getting things done.

Take it from someone *very stubborn* (right mom?) who has tried ALL the ways. Starting your day before your kids is THE way to be the best “you” that you can be; for them and for yourself.

I want to challenge you today to start however you want to. You can start small and work your way up to a full-fledged morning routine OR if you’re an all-or-nothing gal like myself, you can map out your entire day complete with an early morning routine packed full of rituals that will contribute to your mission of up-levelling your life.

Either way you choose is perfect because all you need to do it stay the course. It won’t be easy. You will have to change things and tweak things. You’ll have to take annoyingly intentional actions to make sure that you will not fail… but it will be so worth it!

So, get up with me friend! Let’s start un-crapping our motherhood together!