Inspiring Mama | A Happiness Podcast For Moms & Dads

If you feel like the Sweedish Chef when it comes to projects and tasks in your life (like I do), this episode will change your life. Life systemization expert Megan Flatt teaches simple life management strategies that can clear your overwhelm, cut your anxiety and allow you to live with a new freedom.    Once we become parents, the influx of schedules to balance, stuff to manage, and tasks to juggle can cause undue stress. We have high standards for what we should get done and how our lives should look. But we don’t give ourselves the space to actually learn HOW to do all of this!   When you give yourself time to look strategically at the day-to-day process of your life, you can start to chip away at stressors in a real way. Listen to this episode to take back the drivers seat on the amount of stress that you allow in your life.   Learn more about Megan and to sign up for my free online series - 3 Minutes to Zen: Show Notes Page  

Time to clean your emotional house! Learn how to clear out the cobwebs, people, and past situations that may be keeping you from making the changes you want. Host Lauren Fire will teach you a simple method to do a little spring cleaning in your brain. After this episode, you will know how to go from talking about your problems to actually changing them. We all have crap - baggage that has happened to us. The happiest people aren't the ones with the least baggage, or the most charmed lives. They are just the ones who learned to carry their baggage better - to live beyond their circumstances. Get free happiness methods just like this delivered every other week by signing up here: Get Instant Access In this podcast, learn a method to get rid of your emotional energy suckers. Learn how to shift your perspective on any situation and let go of the resentment, anger, pain, or fear that could be keeping you stuck in many areas of your life. When practiced, this method will help you create an luggage cart for your emo

As moms, why do so many of us stink at making time for ourselves? Why is it so hard and what can we do to take back control? Guest Jessica Turner, author of The Fringe Hours, gives us tips and ideas on how we can actually start to make more time for ourselves. In this powerful interview, Jessica discusses what stops us from making time for ourselves, including the pressure to be everything to everyone, the quest for unattainable perfection, and the guilt we sometimes face when we consider me-time.  She then gives us concrete tips to take back control of our lives, move beyond the people-pleasing, guilt, and pressure into a happier, more fulfilled life. Visit the show notes page for this episode: Making Time Join our community to get a free happiness practice every other week! Get Instant Access  

If you are struggling to lose weight, exercise more, or simply live healthier, a change in your body image and body mindset could make all the difference. Body image expert Tamara Newell explains why a negative body image could be holding you back and how to improve your relationship with your body. Learn how to stop criticizing your body and feel at home in your skin, even if it’s not exactly the body you like. Visit the Show Notes Page: Love Your Body “One day I decided, if this is the body I have, I’m going to love it and I’m going to live with it. When I accepted it, a positive motivation started fueling more love into my body. I wanted to work out. I wanted to eat healthier because I was honoring and embracing my body rather than trying to fix or change it.” - Tamara Newell Criticizing ourselves and our bodies has become the new norm, especially for women. Your friend mentions you look great and you point out your thighs. Your husband says you look sexy and you complain about how breastfeeding wrecked yo

We all know we need to reduce stress, but how?  Holistic Nutritionist Ashley Srokosz teaches you how your diet can impact your stress and how you can use food to balance your hormones, reduce stress, solve sleep and digestion troubles, and even boost your sex drive. Learn how to use your symptoms and cravings to identify what your body is really needing. Understand how your food impacts your stress, what foods you may want to avoid if you live a high stress life and which foods can have you feeling calmer and more balanced. Ashley will also share practical strategies for improving your family's diet on a day-to-day basis. Click here to view the show notes for this episode: Food & Stress Join the Inspiring Mama Village to get a free happiness practice delivered every other week. Click here for your first practice: Join the Village 

Get quick happiness tricks delivered every other week free by signing up for: 3 Minutes to Zen Adding a workout into your routine as a parent can sometimes feel like someone asked you to knit a sweater while climbing Mt. Everest. Fitness expert and busy mom of 4 Mariah Dolan teaches us how to find the time and energy to workout and enjoy the process even in the craziest of chaos. Learn Mariah's 4 tips for fitting workouts into your busy life, as well as her advice for dealing with the negative voices in your head that keep putting you down. Learn how to create new neural pathways in your brain that will have you enjoying exercise more and what to do when you fall off the wagon and stop working out. Visit the show notes page for this episode: Workout Time

Get 10 Free Happiness Lesson Videos – The Treat Yourself Challenge Do you often work to "not get your hopes up"? Do you keep your dreams distant because you think they are crazy or impossible? Host Lauren Fire shares how she has been neglecting her own desire and what she is doing to change that. Learn about the power of desire and dreaming, and how you could be holding yourself back. Even dreaming about something as simple as a clean house can propel you into the direction you want to go. Too many of us stop ourselves from dreaming and wanting becuase we don't understand the "how". We think: If I don't see how I can ever get another job, I can't dream of a better one. I don't see how I can afford a better house, so why even dream of one? Or we don't believe we can do it. We think: I've never been able to keep my house clean, why dream of a clutter-free home. Learn how not to listen to the critical voices in your head that keep you thinking small. And learn why just allowing yourself to dream and desire, apar

Ever had an “ah ha” moment that made the world look differently to you? Host Lauren Fire shares her biggest ah ha moment of the year and teaches you how to feel more peaceful in your life right now. Get 10 free happiness lessons when you sign up for Inspiring Mama’s Treat Yourself Challenge. 10 Days, 10 Ways to Shift from Crappy to Happy. Get Instant Access Memorable Quotes: My inner peace has to be more important to me than how much I get done or what other people think.  Most of us feel like we need to be productive or lose weight, THEN we can feel more peaceful. That’s backwards. Work on the peace. Work on the happiness. Work on loving yourself and feeling good in your life, as it is right now, and the rest of it will fix itself. As a mom, my inner peace is essential for my family to be healthy and happy. So I want to have more influence in how I feel. I want to feel more peaceful and I’m going to make it happen. When I made this decision, I stopped caring what that voice in my head thought of me. There i

Get quick happiness advice from Inspiring Mama podcast guests in the Quick & Dirty Guide to Actually Enjoying the Holidays. Get Instant Access   Thinking positive thoughts helps you enjoy more of your life, but it’s not always easy, especially when people around you are complainers or Bad News Bettys (as I call them). In this podcast I explore how staying positive can improve your day-to-day experience of life. I will teach you five practical ways to stay positive no matter what is happening around you.    Podcast Summary:   Your thoughts create your reality. If you are focusing on the negative, meaning you are entertaining thoughts about negative things that could happen or that have happened, your experience of your life will be more negative. It’s very simple in theory but very difficult to actually practice.    You do have control over what you think, much more control than you may think. You can’t stop thoughts from coming in, but you can choose not entertain them. Imagine an unwanted guest at you ho

Get wisdom from the experts in Inspiring Mama's Quick & Dirty Guide to (Actually) Enjoying the Holidays for free here: Get Instant Access   "The way we react when our emotions run really hot means everything to our kids and to the next generation as well.” - Jessica Felix   Yelling doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent. It just means that you could use a few more tools in your happiness toolbox. Parenting expert Jessica Felix discusses what happens when you flip your lid. Learn what NOT to do after you yell and how to turn even your most stressed out moment into a powerful learning experience for your children.   Interview Summary:   3:20 - What happens in a child's brain when you yell regularly?    Most of the time. we yell because we are stressed or because we somehow get triggered by our chidden. When you yell regularly at your children, you are programming their brains to respond poorly to stress. By flipping your lid regularly, you are setting them up to flip their own lids easily too. You were probably

Get Inspiring Mama's Quick & Dirty Guide to (Actually) Enjoying the Holidays, awesome advice from past and future podcast guests: Get Instant Access   Parenthood doesn’t have to equal chronic tiredness. Energy expert Allan Ting will teach you simple tools and tricks you can use to pump up your energy when you are tired but still have to be “on.” He will also teach you changes you can make to your posture, breath, and beverage intake that will have you feeling more energetic all day. (Hint, it’s not to drink more caffeine!)    Allan learned energy boosting techniques by studying tai chi and qigong as well as neuroscience, Neurolinguistic Programming and high performance personal growth techniques. Get the cliff notes of his knowledge in this interview, including actual physical exercises you can do when you need more energy fast. These really work!    Interview Highlights:   7:20 - How simply changing your posture can give you more energy all day   10:40 - How your breath affects your energy levels 14:10

Gratitude and thankfulness can be rough when your holidays are full of family DRAMA. Relationship expert Summer Howard teaches you how to reduce the amount of drama in your family while actually deepening and improving your family relationships at the same time.  You don't want to miss this interview! Learn a step-by-step process to use when you get triggered by difficult family members or extreme emotions and a way to use your intuition to improve your interactions. Download Inspiring Mama's Quick & Dirty Guide to Actually Enjoying the Holidays Here: InspiringMama.com/Holidays  

InspiringMama.com/TreatYourself Your creativity could be the missing piece in your healing journey. Creativity coach Kathy Stowell will explain how opening your creative channel can improve your mood and expand your overall happiness.   Did you shut the door on creativity when you had a baby or became an adult? Does the word "creativity" conjure up images of puffy paint and hot glue? Creativity is actually not about the finished product. It's about the place you go, the energy you exude while you are in a creative project. Kathy Stowell will explain how you can reopen this channel and rediscover an energy that can heal and transform your life.  She will teach you how to pick new projects that will make you feel more alive and how let go of the perfectionism that may be keeping you stuck.  Like this podcast? Join the Treat Yourself Challenge to learn more about happiness. In  10 Days you will learn 10 ways to shift from crappy to happy whenever you want. Join here: InspiringMama.com/TreatYourself

http://InspiringMama.com Postpartum Depression ("PPD") is one of the most common health issues for moms and yet it is also one of the least understood. Guest Pamela Zimmer, author of Reclaim the Joy of Motherhood: How I Healed from Postpartum Depression discusses PPD myths, realities, and healing strategies. What causes PPD? What does it look like in reality? How do you know if this is baby blues or PPD?  When should you seek treatment? Why do women try to hide it?  As many of you know, I am still healing from the postpartum depression that hit me when my daughter was 5 months old. Like many women, I misunderstood the symptoms of postpartum depression. Because I wasn’t “sad” or “down” or “unbonded to my baby,” I did not seek treatment until my PPD was severe. Today we’re going to talk truth, what is postpartum depression, who is at risk, how do you know if you have it, and what are your options for healing (besides just medication). Learn to Transform Crappy to Happy in 10 Days - The Treat Yourself Challenge

http://InspiringMama.com  How do you pick up a new mommy friend at the grocery store? How do you deepen a friendship with a mom you met in a playgroup or at school? Host Lauren Fire interviews Decker Cunov, a relationship expert who trains men to pick up and connect with women.   Learn how to break the ice with a new mommy friend out in public and ask them on a mommy date. Hint - it starts with presence!  Learn a simple a 3-step process you can use to deepen your friendships. If you want more nourishing and supportive friendships with other parents, Decker's strategy is golden.  Join the Inspiring Mama Village and get 1 short happiness lesson every week, free! http://InspiringMama.com  Connect with me to get more free stuff: http://Pinterest.com/InspiringMamas http://Instagram.com/theinspiringmama http://twitter.com/inspiringmama1

What do you do when you secretly feel like the reality of motherhood doesn't live up to the hype? What happens when the day-to-day grind makes you feel stuck, trapped, sad, overwhelmed, or just plain bored? Learn how to re-discover who you are and what you deeply desire and how to start making small shifts in the direction of a happier and more fulfilled life.  Speaker and leadership coach Tewana Pinard explores why moms have a hard time admitting discontent and what you can do when after you realize that you're not 100% happy. Learn a process you can use to discover who you are and what is most important.  Learn why you may not have been successful at changing in the past and how small changes can bring you closer to your desires and dreams. Interview Highlights: 10:05 - Tewana explains why it's so hard for moms to admit that they're not happy 14:00 - How limiting beliefs can lead you to settle in default unhappiness 16:35 - A new approach you can use to discover who you are and what you want 23:20 - Why it'

Learn how to move through guilt and shame quickly with this short exercise. If you are highly critical of yourself, this podcast will help!  Shame is a very destructive emotion, usually connected with highly critical thoughts and a tense body. If you feel really bad when you make a mistake, or find yourself working tirelessly to please no one in particular, shame is probably the culprit.  But how do you get rid of it? What can you do, in the moment, when you feel bad about a mistake?  You say this to yourself:  I love you and I forgive you. I like to use my name: I love you Lauren and I forgive you Lauren. I learned this from Cheryl Richardson, a highly acclaimed author and speaker. She said in a tele summit earlier this year that she does this when she feels ashamed.  We all criticize ourselves. The people who live the happiest are the ones who have learned how to move through it, putting it behind them rather than in front of them.  It's not about improving yourself or fixing yourself. It's about learning h

Treating yourself isn't just about an ice cream cone or a bath. You can treat yourself by allowing yourself to be happy in any moment of your life. Most of us know this in theory, but don't understand HOW to actually do this in practice. How do you treat yourself to happiness? How do you practice happiness?  Host Lauren Fire explains that happiness is not actually the natural result of success. In fact happiness and success aren't linked together at all. ave to actually do something.  To practice happiness, to treat yourself to happiness, you have to actually shift the way you work with your mind, body, and emotions in the present moment.  Learn how you can use happiness tools to shift how you think and feel at any time. When you learn to do this, you unlock an incredible power in your life to be happy no matter the circumstances.  If you enjoyed this podcast, sign up for Inspiring Mama's Treat Yourself Challenge - 10 Days, 10 Ways to Shift from Crappy to Happy. Sign up at: InspiringMama.com/TreatYourself  Wh

Our “to do” lists aren’t getting any shorter. And the organization tips in magazines only get us so far. We need a new way to think about overwhelm and productivity.   Lauren Fire interviews renowned sports psychologist and high performance consultant Loren Fogelman about overwhelm. Learn new ways to think about your particular brand of overwhelm and strategies for changing your relationship to the “to dos” in your life. Take back your power and feel stronger, more productive and happier with your accomplishments.  Bonus: To hear the entire tapping session between Lauren Fire and Loren Fogelman and to learn how to use tapping and the Emotional Freedom Technique to shift the beliefs that may be causing your overwhelm, visit the show notes page for this episode: InspiringMama.com/Overwhelm Episode Quick Reference Guide: 4:40 - Loren talks about Wonder Woman Syndrome, how the quest for “doing it all” creates overwhelm, self-judgment, and inner criticism.  9:35 - Learn what causes overwhelm and how your belief

Who doesn’t love a good mood! Did you know you can generate your OWN good mood, no matter what is happening? How POWERFUL are you? In this bonus episode, I’m going to teach you how to access your power to feel TOTALLY AMAZING AND ALIVE whenever you want. I call it The Good Mood Generator.   The Good Mood Generator is one of the Happiness Practices that I give away every week to members of the Inspiring Mama Village. You can join at InspiringMama.com. What is a Happiness Practice? I'm glad you asked! My philosophy is very simple. When you practice happiness, you will enjoy more of your life. Have you ever thought to yourself, I will be happy when…I lose 10lbs, change jobs, move, get pregnant… I hate to be the one to break it to you, but sadly happiness is not going to show up at your door when you get any of these things. Because when you get there, you will still be you.  And you still won’t be happy.  You may be happy for a bit. But you will soon find something else to strive for. Happiness is not a goal.